SXSW Archives - Page 7 of 17

SXSW: Edupunk: Open Source Education

Jim Groom, Stephen Downs, Gardner Campbell, Barbara Ganley

Edupunk an approach that results from a DIY attitude and brings the attitude of 70s punk rock bands to the classroom.

Campbell. Tools to put course content online in the 90s we are problematic content delivery model. It’s become a business system rather than a relational driven system.

Groom. LMS is a corporate logic system. It isn’t about learning. Need to think about going other ways.

Downs. Internet teaches us that we don’t need to preserve power authority to learn. Ed designed by people doing the learning is what he’s advocating.

Groom. WordPress Multi User is a communal sharing of resources in education. It’s not about a course, it’s about an individual.

Ganley. It is no longer working inside schools, but thinking in communities of learners.

They talked about open courseware and ways to interact with people without using LMS and if there is a way. How do we access the culture? Do we understand our rights to education and information? How can everybody make stuff?

Audience member suggested the library as a way to structure learning outside the classroom model.

Ganley. Working with rural communities to pool resources from libraries and other community resources. Says it creates a sort of homogenized culture where there’s only one way to think.

Groom. Talked about Black Mountain College in the 50s where there was no structure. Just people in a library who wanted to learn. Public open spaces for learning are dwindling.

A guy from Washington U talked about the tyranny of nostalgia. He asked if universities are still worth it; if not, what are the other models. How do you justify the cost of university education when the content is available in other ways?

Campbell. The conversation needs to start and end with how we realize our human potential.

Downs. Taught an open course, a free course with 2200 participants. 24 people paid tutition because they wanted credit.

Audience member. How does a public school teacher help students do their own learning? Public schools need tools and standards to support them.

Groom. University education and what’s happening in K-12 are not unrelated. Can we imagine a way that people come out of universities without $100,000 in debt?

Ganley. There are ways to work with kids in public schools and to work with parents. Move outside the walls even when you’re in them.

Downs. Personal Learning Environment (Personal Learning Networks) collects people who are practitioners in a given are and have them do their work in an open enviroment. Those who are interested in that area can watch and listen as practitioners create their work. Some tools that put people together in these ways are coming but are not widespread.

Audience member. Universities are mired in tradition. How can they set up a system that gives easier access to new ideas? Campbell. Stop hosting on the .edu server. He uses his own server. Groom. Used his own server space and got things started from there. No channels, open source. WordPress blogs. Not tied with sign-on or university id. Completely separate. Audience member. What if you did something like this successfully on an .edu domain? Wouldn’t other universities follow?

School of Everything.

Ganley. We don’t take advantage of people in our own neighborhoods who are experts in things that could provide expertise.

People are walking out. What does that mean?

Downs. Don’t need a new model for schools. Need to turn schools over to the community.

SXSW: Everything I Needed to Know about the Web, I Learned from Feminism

Julia Angwin, Danah Boyd, Betty Sue Flowers, Heather Gold.

The explosion of social media is entirely a feminist thing. Gold talked about how long the 3rd wave of feminism has taken and how it led to social media.

Flowers: the personal is the political, everything is connected, gossip makes the world go round.

Angwin: My Space was created by men, but is actually about girls. She went to My Space and all the guys were reading Seventeen and Cosmo to try to figure out what to do with My Space. The audience was girls and men had to learn to speak the language. What used to be called women’s work is now just the way the world is.

Boyd. Social networks are strong tie networks, which is a more feminine thing. and weak-tie networds, which is a more male thing. Interactions take place in more formal structures. Social networks shift all the time.

I’m having trouble getting the point of the discussion. Heather Gold keeps asking questions, but leaves no time for answers. Things are jumping around a lot. She’s encouraging the audience to share.

Angwin. Need room for a personal space online. Not public. For extended conversation.

Will government catch up with social networks? When everyone has grown up on it? Flowers is at LBJ Library and says they have trouble just getting archives of Presidental Library online, much less social networks.

A lot of people in audience said they would like to spend time online in a protected space. Boyd. People with less influence have more trouble negotiating context in social settings. There’s a convergence between contexts now.

Unitary identity online. Do you have more than one online identity.

Lots of women at the audience microphone. Too many topics to follow. Maybe I’m just too tired to figure out what we are supposed to be talking about here.

SXSW: Saturday Opening Remarks: Tony Hsieh

Tony Hsieh is from zappos.com. Last year when it rained zappos handed out rain ponchos. Impressed me. This year, no ponchos. Oh, well.

I’m surrounded by a sea of people in zappos t-shirts here in the second row of the second section. Yikes. Gotta watch what I type or the guy next to me will confiscate my computer. On the other hand, I can fill my time while waiting by reading the personalized messages hand inscribed on the backs of all the t-shirts.

Hugh is welcoming everyone. He’s recognizing sponsors. Yea sponsors. Yea staffers. Yea volunteers. He’s talking about how sxsw listens to the bloggers and tweets. Which is why they are so successful. rate.sxsw.com is where to leave your feedback.

Hugh is talking about the rain ponchos. He explained that a mix up meant there were no ponchos this year, but that meant there WOULD BE rain this year. He thanked zappos for bringing the rain.

Tony came out and talked about zappos in Las Vegas and said they were giving away a trip to Vegas. He said more women than men shop at zappos, and one woman spent over 60,000 there. He apologized for causing any divorces.

Tony said that it was pizza that got him into the idea of zappos. He worked in a pizza place and a guy kept coming by and getting large pizzas, which everyone thought he ate. But he was taking them upstairs and selling them by the slice. This guy is now working for zappos.

He and another guy bought zappos as part of another deal, but he realized that zappos was the most interesting and successful and took it over full time. From the beginning, they wanted the zappos brand to be about customer service and customer satisfaction. So they don’t want to be about shoes, as they are now, but about the very best customer service.

Most of their orders (70%) come from repeat customers. Happy customers come back. Repeat customers spend more. Do you hear that, Sprint?

What is customer service? An 800 number on every page of the site. The telephone is one of the best branding devices because you have the customer’s undivided attention It you get it right, the satisfaction grows from person to person. They offer free shipping both ways and have a 365 day return policy.

What is customer experience? Fast, accurate fulfillment. surprise upgrade to overnight shipping for repeat customers. Everything that improves the customer experience is a marketing expense. Sometimes direct customers to web sites of competitors when they don’t have something in stock. Do what’s right for the customer. Call centers have no scripts, no quota of customers to handle per day, lots of training. One customer phone call was four hours long. The warehouse runs 24/7.

Their number one priority is company culture. If the culture is right, then everything else falls in place. Hiring emphasizes culture fit. Can be fired as bad for the culture. Training lasts 5 weeks and includes working in the call center and warehouse before you can get to your ‘real’ job. During the training period, they will pay you $2000 to quit. In 2007, 3% took the offer. In 2008 only 1% took it. Maybe the offer isn’t big enough, they keep increasing it. The people are there because they want to be there! They have a 500 page culture book that contains paragraphs from employees about what the company culture means to them. Twitter helps company culture. They rolled it out to the entire company and have Twitter classes during the training. Over half the employees are on Twitter. Can see at twitter.zappos.com.

Culture and brand are two sides of the same coin. Customer service is the entire company, not just a department. So money goes into the hiring process and the training process instead of other places. They want to own clothing, customer service, and culture. The 3 C’s.

Zappos delivers happiness.

The zappos culture includes committable core values: deliver WOW, embrace change, create fun and a little weirdness, be adventurous and creative and open-minded, pursue learning, be honest, be positive, do more with less, be passionate, be humble.

It doesn’t matter what your core values are, as long as you commit to them.

Steps for building a brand that matters. Decide if you are building a long-term brand. Figure out values and culture. Commit to transparency. Chase the vision, not the money. Build relationships. Build your team (hire slowly, fire quickly). Think long term.

He asked us to think about what our goal in life is. He talked about happiness being perceived control, perceived progress, and two more that I didn’t get. Two or three minutes to go, but my battery is gone. Zap me.

SXSW: Microformats: A Quiet Revolution

Jeremy Keith (blurred), Tantek Celik (standing), Glenn Jones, Karsten Januszewski.

Everyone is using microformats, even if we don’t know it.

Keith showed us huffduffer, a site that creates bookmarks for audio information. It is a consumer of microformats. He talked about rel=”me” for pointing out where you exist on the web. Shows relationship of linked to document to current document. Uses rel=”me” from XFN. If you give your URL to huffduffer, then anything tagged with rel=”me” can be called in from your URL and show as links for you. Then huffduffer goes through all your URLs looking for hCards and avatars and pulls them in. Huffduffer rechecks everything every 24 hours. So if you upload a new avatar to Twitter, huffduffer picks it up within a day. He says we already publish our information, so why make people upload it again for each site. He wants to know how people respond to this. Do they like it, have negative reactions, etc?

Karsten is associated with the MIX09 conference. They built oomph.com that uses microformats to pull in information and get content. Firefox operator plugin shows when there is microformat information on a page. Wrote scripts that will work cross browser (without Firefox plugin) to pull in all micorformats on pages. Available at codeflex.com/oomph.

Glenn works for madgex.com. He talked about how microformats can be used with privacy. Privacy can be implemented by allowing people to use rel=”me” with a system where they sign on and agree to disclose more or less information. Uses oauth, that lets you decide how much access you can get to private information. Microformats are a way to aggregate all the information you leave about yourself on sites like delicious, flickr, upcoming., twitter, linked-in, last.fm, and more. (Shades of the privacy discussion from the previous session.) It pulls in hCard information from all those sites.

Yahoo YQL. Tantek called it an API for the web. Send off a URL and get back all sorts of information.

Tantek. Challenges for microformats are localization and accessibility. Many issues of localization require hacks for language at this point. They are finding solutions to the localization problems. Screen readers have problems with reading out things like dates in a sensible way. They’ve used span elements to solve this. And they’ve begun to store date and time information separately. He wants people to write test cases and implementations and let them know the results. Links on the microformats.org/wiki.

Questions.

SXSW: Is Privacy Dead or Just Very Confused?

Danah Boyd, moderator, with panelists Judith Donath, Alice ?, Siva Vaidhayathan. All three panelists are affiliated with universities.

I’m mainly interested in this panel because I want to see Danah Boyd in action. I’ve been reading her for a long time and am impressed by her writing. I’m torn between watching this panel and the one on The Future of the Internet. Hope someone is blogging The Future of the Internet.

Boyd has been talking to teens about privacy. Vaidhayathan is writing “Is Google the End of Everything?” He talked about how no matter how much we have in a public space (online), there is still a point beyond which privacy is invaded. He talked about that privacy is not a ‘thing’ that has substance and can be traded away in little bits.

Privacy is actually a broad range of concerns about the collection and distribution of information about them.

Alice talked about values. She said social media has value in the technology field. The also talked about the value of social support. Although there is value, there is also a release of information that can be aggregated and used to profile people. If you put information out there, can anyone use it for any reason? She says no.

Donath talked about social visualization. How do all your social media contacts, email, etc., create a visualization of you? People have many public faces in many places. Should you have one large audience in mind or are there different audiences for your public persona? How many personas do you keep?

Boyd: there is a scale of publicity that we’ve never seen before. What are the most important things tech has changed? Vaidhayathan says its about accurate targeting of goods and services. Erosion of comfort level about privacy. In the 70s, privacy laws were passed, but privacy laws undermined by Chaney and others. Interface between personal information and business is not separate from interface between personal information and government.

Donath. We need to be able to “see” what kind of information we are leaving behind when we give information. If we could “see” what we are revealing, it might make us behave in a different way. The data trail is invisible now. In the past, you could reinvent yourself–most of history was not recorded. Now there is continuity that prevents you from leaving your past behind.

Boyd. Most teens don’t consider home a private space. They had more control over their interactions on the internet, so felt it was more private.

Alice. Social context determines the way information flows in that context. Moving information from one context to another is often consider a violation. New tech makes the contexts flow into each other. Personal choices about sharing in between contexts are being erased by technology. Is the burden on the individual or on the business that is collecting information about you? Should the default be that information is not shared?

Vaidhayathan. Information has curreny. We have no way to know how our information is being used. Many people are unaware of the ways to manage information for their own good–checkboxes, switches, online choices, etc. Laws giving even the least sophisticated a level of control are needed.

Donath. Things online can be taken out of context both now and 20 years from now. Everything is moving out of context. Privacy is the sphere of large scale institutional control. Other sphere is around our personal presentation of self.

Boyd. Design is not keeping up with the way we deal with contexts and the merging of info.

Vaidhayathan. Read Jane Jacob about surveillance. Need built in reciprocity in information exchange.

Boyd. Inequalities in information flow. How do you see the issue of celebrity and social interaction? Alice. Not really reciprical even though the celebrity seems to be sharing. A sense of inequality between celebrity and audience. Culture of self-branding and micro celebrity is an issue. Donath. What is the value of the attention that is paid to us? What is the cost of every new person you ‘friend?’ How much do you value the attention that other people pay to you?

Vaidhayathan. Someone who chooses to be engaged with the public deserves to have some say over what kind of information is revealed about them. What about people who haven’t chosen to be engaged with the public? No norms yet making a small avatar on a screen into a real person.

Turned over to questions.

Useful Links: Social Media Products, Typefaces, SXSW photos

Useful links: good resources for using social media, periodic table of typefaces, SXSW photos.

Resources: Web 2.0 Social Media Products, a guide on what to use lists the essentials. Handy.

Periodic Table of Typefaces is brilliant. The teacher in me wants to know where to order poster-size prints for the classroom wall. Hey, Behance, why not team up with Visibone to get this gem published? Visibone already has a direct line straight onto the walls of web design classrooms all over the world.

I’ll be posting photos from SXSW Interactive for the next few days at Flickr. I’m veesees on Flickr.

Twitter, ad infinitum

Twitter is proving itself to be infinitely expandable are capable of amazing things. One of the most interesting uses for Twitter is raising money for worthy causes. Could it raise awareness for web standards education? More . . .

Twitter is proving itself to be infinitely expandable and capable of amazing things. Within the last month or two we’ve seen a coal ash disaster in Tennessee and a plane crash in the Hudson River reported first on Twitter. And arguably with better information than the media could get for several hours.

Gez Lemon recently used Twitter to survey people about whether or not alt should be required in HTML5. This is the tweet that started it all:

Should alt be required for img in HTML5? Please use the hashtag #althtml5 if you respond, so I can find the responses.

You can see the responses using a Twitter search for the hashtag #althtml5. (You’ll see several responses from me, since I originally misunderstood the question to mean that an alt attribute could not be emtpy, as in alt=””. With a little hand-holding from Laura Carlson, I finally realized that he was asking if the alt attribute should be required to be there, even if it’s empty. To which I respond: yes, indeed.)

On a small, local level, a couple of web developer friends recently organized a successful Webuquerque meeting with nothing more than a Facebook page and Twitter.

Twitter is now used to raise money for charity. The latest example is Twestival. Twestival is a world wide Tweet Up to raise money for clean water. You can organize a Twestival in your city, attend an event in your city, or participate online. The event will be on Feb. 12. I predict that it will be a landslide success.

Smaller Twitter fund raising projects have been reported by Mommy Gossip Cares in How Is Mom It Forward Changing the World One Mom at a Time? where $1400 for Thanksgiving dinners were raised with Twitter.

Beth Kanter realized the value of Twitter early on. Recently, she did a thorough analysis of using Twitter for charity in Twitter As Charitable Giving Spreader: A Meta Analysis, which reports on a number of events. She’s successfully raised money using Twitter. She tells more micro-fund raising stories in Twestival: Here Comes Everyone to Raise Money on Twitter for Charity: Water.

When millions of people all over the world are interconnected by the same technology, there’s no telling what can be done with it. New and wonderful uses appear, ad infinitum.

Since Twitter can be harnessed to do good, can it be harnessed to improve education? I’ve been working for months with a group from the Web Standards Project (WaSP) on a standards-based modular curriculum framework for web design education. It’s under discussion in places like A List Apart, The Magazine for People who Make Websites. The curriculum will be released to the public at SXSWi.

I’m wondering if we should release it with a world-wide Tweet Up. The Tweet Up wouldn’t raise money, but it could raise awareness and send educators to the not-yet-public web site housing the first round of completed courses.

Or perhaps an organized Tweet Up isn’t even necessary. What if every person attending the WaSP annual meeting at SXSWi and every person attending the No Web Professional Left Behind: Educating the Next Generation panel at SXSWi sent out a tweet about the curriculum?

Philanthropy 2173’s Give Fast, lists benefits of Twitter for fund raising:

Community building (you can identify other donors, everyone blogs about it), instant infrastructure (giving managed by chip-in, Paypal enables the back office);
Quick commitment – set a goal, reach it, move on;
Little gifts – and lots of them – are the holy grail;
Creativity matters – next year you’ll need a new twist;
Anyone at an organization might be the leader of your next campaign;

Change those benefits to describe education or any other topic you want, the benefits still apply. The quick commitment – set a goal, reach it, move on item seems particularly relevant.

What could you accomplish with a conference audience of several hundred people if all of them tweeted the same topic at an event? For the attendee, it’s a quick commitment, just 140 characters, yet still a contribution. The results are big, even though the individual effort is small.

Cross posted at BlogHer.