Online Facilitation

I'm loving this week's topic as it is very relevant to what I am currently working on with The SmartGirls' Way. Right now, we're focusing on filling a blog with content and bringing in readers. Eventually, we will have to be facilitating intereaction in an online community, but as of now, we don't have any models of what that might look like. For now, we have no website or platform except the Facebook page and the blog. Yet, this doesn't seem to be gettting the kind of community building we ultimately want. Is there a place to find different models of online community working? I'd really be interested in reading some casebook material on this if it exists!

Enhance the Holidays via Facebook!

We just had Thanksgiving and we're about to embark on the holiday season! This is one of my favorite times of the year...mostly because people are updating Facebook like crazy! I look forward to all of your new photo albums. I love reading people's updates about the friends and family that are gathering. Some people even share their family's traditions with their FB network. Personally, I love this! Here are some other cool holiday uses for Facebook:

-Set up a FB "Group" for crowd-sourcing gift ideas for hard-to-please people. Don't know what to get dad? Easy, set up of a group for the whole family (except dad) and post your ideas along with your budget and concerns...

-Donate your status to raise money for charity

-Set up a google alert feed for Holiday events and activities in your area...then post the links that will likely flood your inbox to your Facebook feed and invite your friends!

-Ask your friends to share their favorite recipes, traditions, whatever! Facebook is your gateway to expanding your idea of "holiday" traditions.

These are just some things I thought up...but I bet there are tons more ideas out there!

Source

I am not a Cyborg

I'm having trouble connecting to the topic of Ambient vs. Immersive Media. I frequently engage in ambient media. My Facebook and Gmail account are constantly open in my web-browser. I also listen to talk radio constantly throughout  my day. Often, NPR is playing and I am only catching snippets here and there. I can function without these things in the back ground as well. I do not have a smart phone (yet) and when I am out, I rarely engage in ambient media.

When I think about "immersive" media like World of Warcraft and Second Life...I get an icky feeling creeping up the back of my neck. It's fine that other people engage in these activities. I had never considered them to be social activities until this class but now I can see how it is social. However, when I've experienced immersive media, it's often been through indirect channels. For exampled, I was living with someone who was using immersive media as a means to avoid social interaction with me.

Facebook is a very social place for me. I had not considered it as a form of immersive media but now I am reconsidering that because depending on how you use it (and considering how I use it) I can see it as another immersive extension of one's social life. I often have to pry myself away from it and tell myself that no one is posting because everyone's gone to bed. I wonder what Facebook would be like if everyone used it the way that I do? I could forsee it becoming a lot like Second Life.

Please enjoy this awesome excerpt for the Korean film: "I'm a Cyborg, but that's Ok"

Dear feminism...sometimes you suck when I'm looking for peer blogs.

My Beat Blog is not where I would like it to be. There is so much good information out there that I can use for my topic but my problem is synthesizing it in a timely fashion. I'm having trouble formulating and organizing my post ideas. Each post seems way too complex to manage. Also, my search for peer bloggers has not been fruitful. Ideally, I would like to find business bloggers who are writing about gender inequities in business but it seems that the blogs I find specific to women focus on career advice or coaching. Another blog I found was (annoyingly) geared toward career fashion advice for female MBAs! This is all from a Technorati search.

I suppose there is an audience for these kinds of blogs (seems like the 'professional' version of cosmo magazine) but these blogs don't seem to discuss and address the systemic issues that prevent gender parity in executive leadership or the persistant gender pay gap (all of which have been unconstructively blamed on women's choices). I also want to find blogs about the kinds of business cultures that weaken opportunities for inclusion of all female employees (irrespective of race, class, age, or sexual orientation).

The blogs that I did find on systemic issues tended to be attached to legal organizations or women's organizations. These blogs had very few comments and few regular updates. The topics were mostly news items and based on policy updates or proposals. I didn't get the impression that interacting with these blogs would generate more traffic to my blog. Also, so many feminist blogs tend to look at the  harmful impact of media and domestic violence. This is all important stuff, but where are the business blogs? There are tons of articles about women in business and women lacking rank or positions. There is tons of research about the ways women are treated differently in professional settings...but it seems no one is collecting and discussing that information in one place.

It occurred to me that there could also be a generational/technology gap. Women who have experienced the kind of systemic discrimination I want to look at are older and may not be fully integrated into the blogosphere. I would argue that the most active feminist bloggers are under 40 and do not have the years of professional experience to discuss these business issues in depth. Also, I wonder if women who are tech savvy and in the business world are worried about "outing" themselves if they bring up these issues in the public blogosphere. There is a lot to risk when you stand up and say, "hey, actually you guys are not really helping us out."

For now, I'm following a few of the career coaching blogs and I found one or two pro-women blogs that  are written by men. I would like to find more of these male-written blogs because I see a lot of these system issues arising out of the challenge for one dominant group (in this case men) to empathize/imagine what it is like to be in the less dominant group (women) and to instigate cultural changes accordingly. After all, it was men who gave women the vote, and men who allowed women to legally make decisions about their own bodies and open bank accounts on their own. Therefore, it will be men who create a more inclusive business culture and climate.

I would like to learn more about submitting posts as articles to aggregator sites. I've read a few "How to generate traffic" articles but all in all, I guess I'm looking for a quick fix and my peers.

Don't Waste Our Collective Time: Elluminate Best Practices

Elluminate is the online classroom that we all have to use at BGI. It's a little clumsy but not impossible "to get right." Week after week, I wonder if the one hour we have together in Elluminate will be used effectively or ineffectively. I'm sad to report that it's usually the latter. Part of this problem is technical and for whatever reason, we are still using a platform that has a lot of technical bugs. Another issue, in my humble opinion, is that traditional pedagogical techniques do not translate well to Elluminate (and I care to bet that they don't translate well in a regular classroom anymore because those modalities of learning are so outdated and do not capitalize on the tools we have at our disposal). Here are some Elluminate best practices that Christopher Allen uses in his Social Web for Social Change course. I think the secret to his success in maximizing Elluminate time is a combination of the prep work we do before the class and then after.

1. Assign SHORT relevant online (youtube videos, blogs and articles are good) pre-class readings to be done BEFORE the Elluminate.

     Pro: Gets you ready to discuss the current week's topic in class without burdening you. Also, it enables you to spot any areas you may need to ask questions in. The amount is so manageable that you can read everything an hour before class starts in order to be really fresh. 

     Con: Sometimes this can add too much work to the week. 

2. Spend first few minutes discussing some of the things students produced for the class the week before, share insights and puzzles, give props to good work, quote our work in your slides! 

     Pro: This proves that you care about our work and that you are reading what we write. Also, helps us feel more connected to the rest of the class and allows us to comment and discuss. 

     Con: May cut into "lecture time."

3. Spend a few minutes to call on individuals to summarize the pre-readings. 

    Pro: Shows the readings are meaningful to the course and you can cover and discuss the basics of each article out loud. Also, some of us may not have gotten to read every single article so this is good to get everyone on the same page. 

    Con: It's possible that no one has read the pre-readings. This could be because there was too much assigned or because the connection to the week's topic was not made in the readings and people lost motivation when asking themselves, "why is this relevant?" 

4. Let the pre-reading discussion go into the lecture time: lectures should be short, like 20 to 30 min with comprehensive slides. 

    Pro: A great lecture should expand on the pre-Elluminate readings, not summarize or repeat them. 

    Con: This may be a hard way to do complex topics that should not be over-simplified. But these topics can be expanded upon in the post-class readings. So, it's not necessary to go into crazy depth in class. 

5. End the class with a summary of what is due by the end of the week and the topics of what will be covered next week. 

   Pro: Keeps us in the loop and on track about assignments in case there are any differences or updates. Allows for questions about discrepancies. Helps maintain continuity of the course instead of the class just ending on a random note. 

  Con: Unless prof. is very good with timing, this could make the class go over time. 

Finally! My personal brand video is DONE!

Am I writing correctly for my audience?

I just finished up this simple article about considering one's audience and I'm realizing that I may need to do a complete blog redsign/overhall over at Secretariain't. DARN IT! My goal is to reach an American male audience, but it occurs to me that my Beat Blog looks way too "girly" or "angry feministy"...like, the title is a bit in-your-face. And here, I thought it just had "Mad Men" chiqueness. I'm guessing what I really need is some good male feedback about the blog design and about the posts that are already up. But all of this "catering to the audience" in the context of my Beat Blog topic recreates an age-old scenario of the opressed group having to cater to and educating their own opressors in the *hopes* that their message will be taken seriously. This quandry leaves me at an impasse...am I creating my own problematic scenario by insisting on speaking to the group that I believe can tug most effectively at the strings of power? Or maybe I'm worrying too much about things that I ultimately have no control over? At the end of the day, I know I'm dreading another 4 hr redesign. Is it possible to talk about women's issues to a reluctant audience without being pre-emptively dismissed as angry or wrong?