Dec. 6, 2010

Symphony of Science
Seth Godin on the tribes we lead
Are we in control of our decisions? (Behavioral Economics)
Photoshop Snowflake Brushes
Beloit College squirrels speak

Facebook and Social Networking: Pros & Cons

I just had a nice brown-bag lunchtime conversation-presentation with a small group of folks interested in Facebook and Twitter. The short of it:

• Facebook now has Facebook Pages which are different from personal Facebook Profiles. Facebook Pages are handy for organizations in universities because several administrators can maintain the same page.
• Use mini-feeds, photos, and comments on photos to fuel interaction and conversation.
• Twitter is good for up to 140 characters at a time, perhaps twice a day to promote organization events and activities.

Why should we bother? Because students are regularly spending 2 to 5 hours a day on Facebook. Using Facebook and Twitter gives us a great chance to engage students and other constituents and send ripples through their social spheres to keep us all connected. While we can't directly control our organization's brand on social networks, we can at least participate actively in the conversations.

Here are some social web services that we discussed and some relevant presentations in no particular order:

1. You've Been Facebooked! (short, 14 slides)
2. What is Social Media? (very good, 66 slides)
3. Social Media ROI: Socialnomics (VERY GOOD video explaining why we might want to do Facebook)
4. If we behaved in real life as we do on Facebook (humorous video on some of the CONS of Facebook)
5. Facebook Manners And You (More humorous Facebook CONS video)
6. Trouble with Twitters - Super News!
(humorous video take on Twitter)

The articles we discussed are in this October 2010 NACA Campus Activities Programming Magazine.

Long hunches and the connected mind: where good ideas come from

Ideas and innovation seems to be a favorite theme of mine. Here is nice short discussion of where good ideas come from. I love the connection Steven Johnson of TedGlobal (July 2010) makes between coffee houses and GPS. My main takeaways from the 18-minute video below might be familiar to you already:

1. Chance favors the connected mind.
2. Good ideas come more from long hunches than from flashes of insight.

Related to the above, you might enjoy Jessa Gamble's 4-minute talk "Our natural sleep cycle". It helps me justify my own early morning awake moments.

Using Songs for Second Language Acquistion

Let's just say that at least two professors, not both who teach French, have concurred with me on the value of using songs in the "second" (L2) language one is learning. My L2 is French. Here is a treasure trove of French songs, all by Georges Brassens.

• French Lyrics of various Georges Brassens songs
• 33 songs of Georges Brassens with English translations

My time is short these days, but I will come back to Georges Brassens, I'm sure. In Spanish we have a word "cantautor" (singer-author) for a singer who is also a song writer. I'll have to check to see if there is a special word for it, but I am certain that Georges classifies as singer-poet. Yes, the order of the words matters. The singing attracts our attention, but the poetry holds us.

Some of the songs are on the risqué side, such as Vénus callipyge (video on YouTube). But then, this is also a source of motivation in L2 learning!

Crowd Accelerated Innovation ≠ Shallow Thinking

I've thought much about and enthusiastically participated in local crowd accelerated innovation on the web in my organization. With Google's introduction last week of instant search results as we type our queries, the realization of how the web and online video affects how we share and think has risen again. Here are two articles that highlight the possibilities very nicely:

1. The secret power of YouTube
   by Chris Anderson of TED.com for CNN.com
   
2. Mind control: Is the internet changing how we think?
   by Matt Ford of CNN, quoting Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brain

Before it slips my mind, because indeed, I do think in shorter bursts than before the internet became so ingrained in my lifestyle, I am now even more motivated to learn how to create and use video as a tool to share ideas. And I will embrace the solitude and clarity of thinking that waking up early in the morning provides me to think at length on a particular topic.

Second Language Acquisition

Time to wake this blog back up. A link to remember: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11086381