Wiki Worlds at CELSA

Fall, µ2007, and the wiki wizards of the e-comms class are hard at work at The Strike Zone

Putting music on your blog

Try out Radiohead for music on your blog! Before you are too old to care...

New directions in ISCOM Montpellier: e-comms

Good efforts this year from ISCOM Montpellier's first class in e-comms:
Natasha
Clemence
Justine
Paul
Arina
Lauriane
Yanis
Fanny

Creating a class blogosphere at the Sorbonne's CELSA, Fall 2005

The excellent work of the 2005-2006 class of undergraduate students in E-Culture and Communications at the Sorbonne's CELSA covers a range of subjects. Good examples of the work can be found at the following addresses:
Chantal
Erwan
Marie
Charlotte
Sylvan
Coralie
Jean Sebastian
Julliette
Jean Francois
Claire
Helene

The ultimate way to share photos

The ultimate way to share photos is at Flickr.This site has just about every kind of photo from every kind of source you can imagine. Maybe you would like to share some of yours?

The new way to find a new car

Well, your teacher returned home to find that someone had stolen his trusty C15 delivery van, essential tool in the renovation of his dream home in the mountains. Never worry--e-culture has a solution for everything. A friend who knows the European car market told me about this one, Autoscout24, where you can find cars, and especially second-hand utility vehicles like I need, from all over Europe, often at much better prices than around the corner. So I have found several good possibilites. Next step. Getting one here.
I was very disappointed at the level of administrative e-culture when I reported my stolen vehicle at the local gendarmerie. Apparently France is not quite there in terms of spotting these things on the highway. Only in movies, American movies at that, does a cop spot a stolen vehicle, check their onboard computer, and pull the culprit over. The local gendarme told me their computer only worked in one of their vehicles--some kind of connection problem. Alas!

Bridging the dreams of e-culture and the constraints of everyday life

From time to time our class turns to the discussion of the gap between the lovely dreamlike world of fantastic technology in e-culture, and the grey qualities of the "real" world, where getting a job is increasingly competitive, where paying the rent is more expensive than ever (especially in Paris), where living expenses exceed your paycheck, where someone steals your car while you're teaching, and, in short, a place where dreams seem to have no place at all.
It's no picnic out there, is it? This is where the rubber meets the road: where your motivation has to meet the hard reality of the job market or whatever realworld constraints you have set up for yourself, from motherhood to teaching aspirations.
I am a little hard pressed to find suitable words to explain this, still mourning the recent loss of my old faithful C15. I appreciate what one student, Christine, said today. She said, maybe this new e-ecosystem is a response to the old culture, our only way of dealing with that "real" world out there that sends us obstacles every day.
That's why I think we have to hold onto our dreams to bridge the gap between e-culture and the real world we are creating with jobs and careers. One of the characteristics of this new environment is the way we can bring together who we really are with our career and business or organizational goals. That is what is producing amazing results like this lovely browser, Firefox, on our computers, or Wikipedia in our bookmarks, and thousands of other dreams realized on the web and in e-culture.
As Green Girl put it, maybe we have to fight for these things, to make it happen.

Creating communities of bloggers

At a point about midway through our course in e-culture we discussed the way the most successful initiatives in internet applications create communities of value, the most extreme example being pointed out here by Louk, Entropia, where a community created an artificial value to a non-existent island.
And at some point, hard to say exactly when, our group of student bloggers became a community of bloggers. The ubiquitous presence of electronic cameras made entries like the this inevitable. Now if we could only retouch photos in realtime.

Getting help designing blogs

There are lots of ways to design blogs, ranging from the simplest route of just using a free template to actually getting down into the code and changing or designing the format yourself. For design help, there's sites like Mandarin, and others, where you can get professional tools. I have included a color chart link at the side because I personally like to at least fool around with the colors and you need the HTML reference numbers. There are several sites with additional free templates, very spacy looking. There a number of unofficial blog award sites where you can look at what someone has called the best blogs.
When you finally like what you have yourself, there is always the option of listing your blog on Google.

More blog vocabulary than you could ever want

For more blog vocabulary than you could ever want, take a look at samizdata. Now, I don't vouch for the accuracy of any of it, but it will certainly entertain you.

The co-production of a class blogoshpere

Of course, our class is not long enough to explore all of the aspects of e-culture or even the micro-environment of blogs, but I hope we have at least planted a few seeds that can bear fruit later. I particularly appreciate blog entries like Killiane's recent discussion of the role of the web in social responsibility in which she builds on the good work started by Thierry. Blogs have thousands of variations and thousands of good and bad qualities, but one of their strengths is this aspect of co-production.
Recall the six qualities we discussed early in the course. Generosity, the first of these qualities, is all about sharing. Sharing ideas and energy makes a big difference in what is ultimately accomplished by the class as a whole and each student individually.
Generosity is such a powerful way of opening up lines of communication that it has literally become an organizational strategy behind some of the most striking success stories in e-culture. Companies that are now capitalized in the billions of dollars, such as Google, owe their success to a simple gesture -- giving away information search services to millions of web surfers. This blogline, and all of the blogs written by the students in the class, have been written on free storage space and with free software provided by companies like Blogger.com, Bloglines, and so on. The millions of bloggers around the world are a sign of their phenomenal success and influence.
Thierry offers us another example in his discussion of Skype, a new free internet phone service. Of course, many of the examples we will find have a corporate or commercial objective in mind, especially for the long term, but this does not diminish the value of their free service. And many more examples can be found that are pure plays in the realm of e-culture generosity, free texts, references, libraries, and so on.
There is even a site for free blog vocabulary, for of those of you who are still wondering about some of these terms.

Blog locators are not just for getting dates

Although blog locators like the one for NYC and automatic blog profile matching looks like a variation on the longstanding promise of the web to play a role datemaking and matchmaking, it seems to have had some positive results in other ways. One student reports that he has found a person blogging in his neighborhood in Paris who works for an agency he is hoping to interview with. No results from the match yet, but a success story nonetheless.

Who owns blogger content?

One of my students came up with an interesting link to epic, a film that takes a shot at predicting the future of the blogosphere/news/information environment in the coming decade. It looks pretty spooky the way they describe it, and it raises a curious question.

Who owns, or will own, all of the writing, art, photography, poetry, whatever, being generated by millions of blogs around the world? Imagine that this blog, or another one, is so good that the content is worth publishing in the conventional sense. Who owns the intellectual property rights? Blogger.com? Google? Imagine all of the images, photos, poems, stories, reporting and everything else on the millions of blogs being written around the world. Nice resource, isn't it? Sort of like the motherload of intellectual property.

Take a look at the film. See if it doesn't spook you, too.

Bogus blogs could spread viruses

Of course, the success of blogs makes them a great target for virus infections. The BBC technology section reports that bogus blogs are helping phishing gangs spread viral infections. Usually a strategy encouraging visitors, "social engineering", is part of the deception, so accidentally coming upon one of the bogus blogs is unlikely.

The reasons behind the reasons for studying

I often ask my students to discuss the reasons behind the reasons they are taking my course, or are enrolled in the graduate program on electronic culture.
This is important, because by recalling your motivation, actually recalling it before each class, you can improve the chances that the class will meet your needs precisely. You can see what is of value to you in your personal needs, and remain attentive and motivated by the subject, or even ask for more information on the subjects you need to know about.
As we discuss motivation, students usually begin by stating what I would call their immediate objectives, things like changing careers, learning about a new profession, or just simply getting a job. I ask them to look for the larger issues behind those objectives. Of course, to get a job means to pay the rent, to put food on the table, and so on. But after that?
Since my courses are focused on the evolution of e-culture, and are taught in English in a French speaking country, students often mention the desire or motivation to learn more about other people, to have more contact with people from different cultures, and improve their ability to communicate in English. This is certainly a benefit of studying and working in a field is driven by the connectivity of the internet. But I ask them to look deeper. Is their motivation just to have more contact, to learn more, accumulate vast stores of knowledge, or is it to do something with that knowledge? Of course, we usually agree, their motivation is to accomplish something with that knowledge and ability.
One student recently said her deepest motivation was to share something of herself with others. This is really one of the most promising aspects of e-culture, the area where it has already excelled in many ways. I told a friend recently that file-sharing, the current buzz word for illegal copying of programs, music, films and so on, may be seriously flawed in the protection of intellectual property, but that, he had to admit, even the sound of the word was pleasant.
Sharing--generosity--is the first step in opening up lines of communications and accomplishing something in the years to come.

Four Essential Characteristics of e-culture

We began our investigation of e-culture and communications by a discussion of the four qualities that characterize all phenomena, but are especially relevant to the world of electronic culture (Christine provided us a good definition of these four qualities.)

Impermanence The first, impermanence, is well illustrated by Louk's example of archive.org in his Hello the Blog. By looking at an archive of the web, you can see how much websites change and haved changed over a number of years, how their strategy, format, design, products--everything--changes, all of the time. Several students pointed out that most online versions of newspapers offer what their paper versions cannot: realtime updates of breaking news.

The rewards of an open mind The second principle we discussed is that electronic culture rewards those who are willing to let go of old habits and adopt new ones. Cultivating an open mind is a plus in electronic culture. Many good examples were proposed by class bloggers. Louk once again scored with a discussion of music. The habit of thinking of music as something delivered on a tangible object in the form of a disc or cassette or even CD is rapidly becoming a handicap. Sites like iTunes provide a much faster and more efficient way of managing music at home and acquiring music (legally) from distant sources.
Thierry reminded us (since it was tax time) that the French government literally rewards you (twenty euros, I believe) for adopting a new habit of filing your taxes on line. Those who refuse to adopt this approach must also file earlier. Estelle discussed the issue of music ripping on the internet and talked about some of the new, legal approaches to downloading music. This issue, hotly disputed on both sides, is one where an open mind is a very useful tool in evolving a new model.
In our discussions, the link between the first principle, impermanence, and the second, an open mind, was made to explain that because e-culture evolves at such a furious pace and changes all of the time, those who are unwilling to look at new approaches, or even slow to do so, are penalized for their hesitancy. It is a domain in which "tradition" takes on a strange quality. The tradition in e-culture is rapid evolution and constant change.
Shortly after having a child, one student discovered the joys of having groceries delivered directly to her house. Adopting this new habit provides her with extra time to do her schoolwork and blog, and is a good example of the rewards of trying new approaches.

Transparency Transparency refers to the way the web shines light into the actions and operations of every player involved. It imposes new rules on people, organizations, companies--everyone involved--whether they like it or not. Stories as diverse as Monicagate and the recent prisoner treatment in Iraq demonstrate that good and bad acts are inevitably revealed by the transparency and interconnections of e-culture, with important consequences for the organizations and institutions involved.
For example, the question of where products are produced and how is becoming easier to track. Thierry showed us how consumer organizations tracking Nike have news to report that differs significantly from that proposed on Nike's official website. The fact that many corporations and institutions feel inclined to communicate their code of ethics is a type of institutional or corporate transparency that is becoming the norm, in part due to the power of the web to tell the story if they don't. Estelle writes about the rise of blogs from within institutions written by employees to change or protest company policies such as the treatment of student nurses in hospitals in France.
Another example: the recent surge of donations, many internet based, for relief work following the tsunami disaster in SE Asia might lead some to ask how the money was spent, Max explained.
Cecile called our attention to one of the most talked about David and Goliath stories in recent times, Apple versus an individual who disclosed product initiatives before their launch.

Precious opportunities The last quality we discussed involves the precious opportunites that e-culture offer. This quality has several interpretations. Louk saw it as a description of the unique and special opportunities that the web can create for distant individuals with common interests to meet and benefit from that contact. Christine chose to highlight the way e-culture offers precious opportunities in the business sense--precious opportunities to launch or expand a business, citing the example of easyJet and the importance of the internet in the success of its founder.
Thierry reminded us of the Three Click Rule. When websurfer behavior is looked at closely, one of the things that is remarked is that if they can't find what interests them in three clicks, they move on.
We also discussed the fact that contact was itself a precious opportunity. Since good and bad acts will eventually have their impact (see our principle above of transparency) the contact you make should have a positive, ethical quality, and should be treated by yourself with respect. Anti-spam tools mentioned by Cecile are part of a reaction to the constant problem of unwanted promotional activities, but marketers and everyone else making contact with surfers on the net should consider the lasting impact their actions might have. Trust once lost, goodwill once spent, is very hard to get back.

The Six Qualities

Every class has its own style and method for evaluating the participation and work of students. My evaluation of my students' work is based on their efforts preparing assignments and participating in the course. I use the following criteria, which are a good set of successful qualities in any activity, personal or professional:

Generosity —your contribution to the class activities and your team. This means, how much you give to others in sharing your creativity, your energy, your ideas and questions in class and in your group. It means how much you participate and help me and other students make this an interesting, productive and enjoyable class.

Discipline—how much you apply yourself to the problems in an organized, disciplined manner. This shows up in how you organize your study materials, listen, take notes, keep up with the class, pay attention, and so on.

Patience—each of you is at a different level, and will make progress at a different speed. It really doesn’t matter where you start, but your tolerance for others, is very important. You need to be patient, helpful, tolerant, and a good listener to get things done. Good work takes time to develop. Don’t let your emotions distract you from the process.

Perseverance—effort is important, and your willingness to stick to it, even if the task is difficult is essential. Don’t give up easily, and don’t get frustrated. There will lots of new words and new concepts to learn, but keep at it. Remember—the most important progress is made one step at a time. It doesn’t matter how small the step is as long as it is in the right direction, and you keep going.

Insight—it’s important that you develop your ability to reflect on what you are learning. Take some time on a regular basis to think quietly on your own about what you are learning, how it fits into the real objectives of your studies and your career, and how you can make the best of it. Think about how the principles we study can apply to you.

Analysis—the first five qualities are designed to lead you to the last: an intelligent, creative, and wise analysis of the subject matter, projects, problems, and the overall subject matter. Wisdom is the ability to recognize how things fit into the big picture, learn from both success and failure, and make progress.