Serendipity35

Way back in 2004, Facebook launched. It was for students and it centered around schools. In 2006, they opened up to everyone else and the school aspect moved out of the center.

Facebook has crossed the 100 million users mark. That's big. For comparison purposes, MySpace hit the 100 million mark in 2006 after 3 years. It took Facebook 4 and a half years.

At Passaic County Community College, MySpace is bigger with students than Facebook. (There's a good study waiting out there on why students choose one over the other, or use some other social network like Orkut.) MySpace offers you a kind of web site with tools and connections and lots of freedom to hack the design (hence the large number of really ugly sites). In Facebook, you always know you are in Facebook. There are lots of applications to add, lots of ways to connect. You can pull in your outside blog, but you can't have a blog there (as you can with MySpace).

Facebook has a new program called Schools being tested that literally connects to their school. It allows students to view their course calendar. Drop/adds show up in Facebook as soon as the registrar’s office reports them. Schools can also include ways for student groups to have pages within Schools where students can interact. The Schools program was developed by Inigral and it is being tested at Abilene Christian University.

from PC World:

The Facebook application is managed by the institution not the students and is plugged in to the school's database giving educational institutions more control over how and what information is shared.

Students who opt in to the application can view their entire course calendar within Facebook and if they add or drop a course at the registrar's office those changes will be immediately reflected in the Schools application.

Does Facebook want to reconnect to its base (the political season has me thinking in these terms) of students? Or, is Facebook looking to become an enterprise level higher education software package? Would the latter actually make them so mainstream that they would lose any cool factor that students find appealing?

I used to hear, in the days of Web 1.0, that email was the killer application. The past few years I have heard that email is dead. Our students prefer text messages, IM, Twitter and other social networking tools.

We added ShareThis to Serendipity35 this year so that readers could share a post or the blog with others using Facebook, delicious, Digg, Twitter or even that old time email. (It's that link & image at the bottom of this and every post.)

Well, ShareThis recently posted on their own blog the chart that I show here about the ways  people are sharing content using their service.

I don't know that their stats would match those for Serendipity35 (that information isn't available to us), but it's interesting to see that good ol' email is still getting the biggest slice of the pie.

65% of the sharing is happening with 2.0 tools (with Facebook getting the most action - 10% of the pie), but the results are fragmented with no other tool/service dominating.

How about you? Are you still most likely to share online content with others via email or some other application? Is this something that varies more based on user age?

Back in April 2006, Tim & I helped organize a a day-long seminar on podcasts, wikis and blogs at NJIT. It was designed for non-technical business professionals to learn about these new tools and how they might be used in a corporate setting . Though I had been blogging for a while elsewhere, Serendipity35 was a new thing. I had been doing podcasting in preparation for NJIT to enter iTunes U. Still, we ended up doing the session on wikis.

Though the term "Web 2.0" had been around since 2004 when Tim O'Reilly defined it as business embracing the web as a platform and using its strengths, you didn't hear the term being used that much. My post has had 25,000+ reads since then, probably just because of it containing the keywords podcast, wiki, blog and business.

Three years ago, Business Week did a cover story on blogging called "Blogs Will Change Your Business." It was one of their first big pieces on "bottom-up media" and "news as conversation." Many people, especially in the business world, associated blogs with "trivia, banality, venom, and baseless attacks."

"Beyond Blogs: What Business Needs to Know" was one of their June 2008 cover stories. Like my old post, that 2005 article continues to draw many online readers. Type in "blogs business" at Google today and the story comes up at the top of the results. 2005 was before YouTube, Facebook was a college baby and no one could Twitter, but the magazine warned that "Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Catch up...or catch you later." Business Week set up a blog at Blogspotting.net that is still going.

So, let's update that seminar a bit here. They started their new article by crowdsourcing the research. They posted questions on Blogspotting and asked what needed to be updated in the 2005 article and readers makes lots of suggestions. So they annotated the original article and added lots of notes and clarifications and created an updated version. But, being that they are still (this year) a print magazine, they had to publish a new print version too. In that version, they admit to having missed a part of the blogs story - the 2.0 part.

Sure, blogs would become the new printing press making lots of folks publishers, journalists and editors. But they also would be just part of the revolution. The other DIY tools (podcasts, wikis...) and social networks (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn...) would actually grab more people than blogging. (They cite a recent study from Forrester Research saying that only a quarter of the U.S. adult online population even bothers to read a blog once a month.)

Not all of what they see going on is good for business: rivals become "friends," share company information, post pictures of products and employees, spend hours on Twitter, YouTube. IBM set up its own social network for employees called Beehive and it has 30,000 employees on it. Good for business?

What changed in that updated version of their old cover story? The first thing to change was the title - delete "blogs" and go to "Social Media Will Change Your Business."

How many are there out there? Technorati was indexing 112 million blogs early in 2008 and reported that 120,000 new ones appear each day - BUT only 11% of blogs have posted within the past two months, so the real number is probably more like 13 million blogs. (Other sources say it's more like 4 million, but that's still a lot of blogging going on.)

Do you count the microblogging hit Twitter in there? Personally, I don't see the appeal of these 140 characters maximum posts, but more than a million people do.

What about wikis? The British telecom giant, BT, has more than 16,000 employees collaborating on wikis. They use the same open-source software that Wikipedia and Tim & I use for our wiki. Their employees use them to write software, map cell-phone base stations, launch branding campaigns and allow engineers in Asia to pick up a project as Europeans go to bed.

Business Week found that "An intern can amend the work of a senior engineer. Meanwhile, some 10,500 employees at BT are already on Facebook. BT is also offering an internal social network. But just like Facebook and Twitter, it won't work unless it attracts a crowd. [They] can't force anyone to use it. It would be fruitless to try... [all they] can do is provide tools and watch."

That leaves podcasting. Podcasting hasn't caught on as dramatically. According to some sources, "podcast awareness" has increased from 22% of the public in 2006 to 37% in 2007 and may reach 50% this year. More than 70% of all podcasts are still heard/viewed on computers and not on a portable media player like an iPod. (Remember that the POD originally meant "portable on demand.") The listener market is currently estimated at over 6 million. A number of traditional media sources offer podcasts (The New York Times, Forbes, The Scientific American, Time etc.) Podcast advertising is perhaps the best indicator of where this medium is headed in business. The predictions are for a compound annual growth rate of 154% from 2006 to 2010. ($3.1 million revenue in 2005. The iTunes software still dominates podcasting and is the big (but not the only) podcast distribution point for content with 38 million iTunes users.

We'll check back in a few years and see what else we all missed.

Part of today's content at the PCCC Writing Initiative Summer Institute will be a hands-on session creating a LibGuide for our faculty involved in redesigning their courses as "Writing Intensive."

 

Though LibGuides, a product from Springshare, is aimed at libraries, we are already using it in ways other than just a library tool used by librarians.

As of now, in New Jersey, there are only 2 public libraries -Burlington County Library System and Camden County College and 4 schools - Ocean City Free Public Library, my own Passaic County Community College, Princeton University, and Rowan University - using LibGuides. However, there are currently 8,322 LibGuides published online by 3,757 librarians at 226 institutions. The number of institutions has doubled since January. (See the Community page)

We purchased a license this year because we specifically wanted to have each of the 20 Gen Ed courses we are redesigning over the next 5 years use a LibGuide. What we like about this tool is that it a very easy web design tool that also allows for easy collaboration (through accounts). Each of our courses will have at least one faculty member who is teaching the course as a lead editor, and at least one librarian or subject matter expert as an editor.

We also have guides for the Writing Initiative, our college writing exam, Spanish audio files, the College Experience course and online learning resources - and , of course, for the college library.

It you're a very 2.0 person already, you might say it sounds like a wiki, and their are some similarities. Creating a blank guide is very simple for anyone with an account. Then the web pages are built using a series of "boxes" that you select. There are simple text and rich text types, plus video embedding, links with annotations, RSS feeds, pathways to your libraries databases etc.

The first guide I did when I was learning how to use LibGuides was a simple one page meta-LibGuide for my fellow PCCC account holders with links to particular other school guides that I thought they could use as models, and some help pages. You can pick a custom URL for your guide (I made it http://pccc.libguides.com/users ) or just accept the system-generated URL (in this case http://pccc.libguides.com/content.php?pid=5263 )

There's an admin toolbox for your account that lets you set sitewide colors and formats (basically CSS), design the home page, banner, etc. You can also leave some areas open. For example, we have chosen to allow individual guide creators to change their colors and other style settings.

You can allow or disallow comments for a box, page or guide.

There are nice 2.0 plug-ins like a del.icio.us tag cloud

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or your Twitter or other feed

and links since you will want to be able to share your guide with friends (in the social networking sense of friends anyway) via your favorite social sites and tools like Digg or MySpace or that old favorite, email.

LibGuides was the first library app to be added to Facebook, so you can meet your students where they hang out.

Every page in a guide has a link at he page bottom that says "View this page in a format suitable for printers, mobile devices and screen-readers" which will strip out the styles that make web pages suitable for those applications and accessible for those with special needs.

And the plain text or rich text or code view editors allows for users ranging from those who are only used to a word processor (rich test) to code monkeys to create new pages easily.

You can also collaborate by pulling information from other guides that you have already created, others from your institution or from other institutions. For example, you create a course guide that includes a page on eTutoring and another on using MLA style for the research assignment. When you create your next guide, if you want to use those two pages again, you simply select them and they will be pulled into the new guide. Not your traditional learning object but the same concept. It's the same for someone else's content. A good idea for people to share pages within a department or college.

Which brings me to permission and rights... Within PCCC, it would be easy for me to ask a colleague permission to use their content, but what about if a teacher at PCCC wants to include some of the history research material from an Acadia Libguide or the 12 step guide to "Writing College Papers" from Anne Arundel Community College?

When you find the guide you want to use as a template for your own guide, contact the guide owner (their contact info is in the profile box on the right of a guide) and get their permission to use the guide as a template. What if you don't ask first? Keep reading.

When you create your new guide, the options for the guide template (at the very bottom) are to use a guide from one of community institutions. Select that and the pop-up will expand and ask you for the URL of a guide from another institution that you would like to use as a template. LibGuides will find this guide and copy its contents into your newly created guide. It will also send an email notification to the original guide owner telling them you used their guide as a template. Your email address, your institution, and the name of your new guide will be listed in this email sent to the original owner. Springshare can remove permissions and accounts for abuses. I'd like to see the option for me to add an editor from another institution to a guide so that we could collaborate on a guide. (Are you reading this post Springshare people?)