Scott, Mike, and Brad gather around the microphone to reflect on the third disruptive tech class including how Paul Ford’s “The Web Is a Customer Service Medium” can play out on a University campus and how past and present sections of Disruptive Tech have tackled the issues of using technology as social glue.
Cole says
Hi guys … I am very much enjoying these reflective podcasts. If I had a co-conspirator I would be doing the same thing, but alas I am flying this plane along this semester.
One technology I wanted to pull back into your conversation from classes of the past is Pligg. During the first running we actually had the students create their own blogs and we aggregated content into a self hosted pligg implementation. Pligg was/is an open source digg clone. It allowed the students to up vote the posts that spoke to them the most. If I remember correctly we let each student have 3 or 5 votes that they could use to promote posts up. A few very interesting things happened with that … the first was that students began “writing for their audience” in a much more intentional way, using very catchy titles to gain attention. The other was that it gave Scott and I even more insight into what things they thought were important as people actually highlighted posts that weren’t their own. That second point I think may have more interesting opportunities for ongoing conversation if we could ever get in a room together.
The other thing I am finding fascinating about the podcasting you are doing, is that it is helping me set the structure of my course as I am a few weeks behind you — Class 2 is on Thursday. And while I originally thought I would continue the trend of rotating themes each week, I have decided to do four blocks — community for a few weeks, identity for a few weeks, design for a few weeks, and in the last portion mash it up. I think having undergrads instead of grad students makes it more complicated to bounce through the themes. This gives me a chance to slow down and focus some energy week over week on a theme. We shall see.
Finally, it is funny you mentioned the “what teens actually think” pieces from Medium as I have them on my reading list for week 4. I think it will be a good lead in to having them expose the community enablers in several contemporary social services.
Scott P McDonald says
Cole,
Thanks for jumping in here. I just saw you posted a reflection on your first class, so I will get in the game over there as well. I think the medium piece might be a connection point between the classes (as a starting point). You have teenagers (or pretty close) in your class, so it would be interesting to get their take. Also, we have considered asking the CI 597 students to write a piece for medium as part of the course this semester, to try out the audience question in a different way.