I'm a week or so into building our new department here at Keene State, which I am proposing we call Online Communications. I actually like some of the more trendy names, but sometimes it's good to use the idiom common in the field. Makes a lot of things simpler.

Now to the hard part -- defining what we do.

I think the key here is it's not just about technology. We want to be involved primarily in designing online approaches to communication -- the construction of those approaches is something we may or may not do -- the implementation might be handled by us, or by others at the college, by a third party vendor, or most usually by some combination of those three options.

So in that somewhat annoying 80s parlance it's a "solutions" business.

Which leads to the question -- why seperate online communications from traditional communications at all?

I think the answer to that is that in five to ten years these things won't be separated out. There'll be a person who manages community -- both online and offline. There'll be a communications director who came up through the ranks both blogging and pushing stories to TV News. Your fundraiser will talk about recent advances in distributed online fundraising with the ease they talk about the mechanics of capital campaigns.

But we're not there yet. There are people with a wealth of experience in traditional media and fundraising who have very little idea how online media works.

In fact, a number of things in online media are counterintuitive to traditional media types. Radical transparency. Community contributed content. Conversational talk with bylines.

I'll give just one example from the political world. And I'll make it a small example. Not earth-shattering, but just enough to show what I mean.

Last year, Tim Tagaris, Internet Director for the Chris Dodd campaign, revolutionized the way political fundraising emails were sent out.

How? Political fundraising emails were highly formatted affairs -- they had graphics, big header, carefully crafted prose. They looked like marketing web pages. They talked like marketing pages, in that conversational but not conversational way:



I'm not saying anything about Hillary in particular here, it's just an example -- this is how all campaign fundraisers looked.

And to be fair, these work, and they'll continue to work. There's a place for the well-polished semi-conversational fundraising email that isn't going away anytime soon. You'd be crazy not to base the majority of your email campaign on solicitations such as these.

But solicitations like these were really the *only* thing in the mix until last year.

Then Tim changed things, and added a new sort of email to the mix. Here's what I got September of last year from Team Dodd:

from: Chris Dodd <Chris_Dodd@chrisdodd.com>
reply-to: Chris_Dodd@chrisdodd.com
date: Sep 27, 2007 9:43 AM
subject: Real quick

Hey,

I only have a few seconds on my way back to Washington from last night's debate.

The fundraising quarter is wrapping up and we're just short of hitting our goal. Will you chip in $23 and put us over the top? You can contribute here:

http://www.chrisdodd.com/deadline

I'll be in touch soon.

Chris

It didn't stop there. Here's what Tim encouraged Chris Dodd to send out on November first last year:

from: Chris Dodd <chris_dodd@chrisdodd.com>
reply-to: chris_dodd@chrisdodd.com,
date: Nov 1, 2007 11:22 AM
subject: Fw: Re: Update?

Dear Friend --

I only have a few moments on my way back up to New Hampshire.

I asked my Campaign Manager for an update on what we accomplished online during the month of October, and I was so pleased with her response I wanted to make sure you saw the email chain.

She tells me that in addition to a spike in traffic and mentions on progressive blogs, we could beat John Edwards October online fundraising goal if I emailed a few people and asked them to help get us there.

So, it might be one day removed from October, but if you chipped in $27 right now we can pass another campaign in this important indicator of support.

You can contribute here:

http://www.chrisdodd.com/contributions

I'll be in touch,

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Tagaris [mailto:ttagaris@chrisdodd.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 10:18 PM
To: scohen@chrisdodd.com
Subject: Re: Update?

Hey Sheryl,

Here's your update:

For the month of October, we raised right around $400,000 on the internet alone.

By contrast, Biden set a goal of raising $500,000 online by the middle of November. He is halfway there, having raised $246,270 as of Tuesday morning.

Even more impressively, Edwards set a goal of raising $500,000 online in the month of October. For all the hype their internet team and Joe Trippi gets, we finished the month nipping at their heels.

Frankly, we've been so successful online over the past month because of the Senator's leadership in the Senate.

People really responded favorably to his stand on preventing "retroactive immunity" for telecommunications companies that helped the Bush Administration spy on Americans.

They appreciate his Iran vote, consistent leadership on Iraq and really are beginning to recognize that when he takes a position on an issue, the rest of the candidates seem to follow his lead.

We are really on the verge of something special online -- a tipping point, almost:

* Our web-traffic rankings have shot past Biden and Richardson.

* We have seen an almost universal surge of support in online polls. From 21% at Daily Kos, to winning the PA Dems online vote after Tuesday's debate.

* References to his leadership on blogs across the country have spiked in the month of October, and I only see that number rising between now and the Caucus.

So ... there is a lot of encouraging information coming out of the tubes. We're gonna do everything we can to keep growing -- something that is made easy as he continues to lead on the issues important in this race.

Tim

-----Original Message-----
From: Sheryl Cohen [mailto:scohen@chrisdodd.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 7:18 PM
To: ttagaris@chrisdodd.com
Subject: Update?

Hey Tim,

The Senator is looking for an update report of how we did on-line in October. He knows we did well, but he's getting a lot of questions about it on the road from reporters and supporters. Please send me some additional information/data for him -- thanks much.

Sheryl

OK -- does that seem gimmicky? Maybe. It doesn't to me. But if it does to you, it's because it's so obvious when you see it that you can imagine it being easily copied.

The weird thing is that before Tim the idea of a candidate sending a plain text conversational email, especially a FW: RE: subject type -- it just wasn't done.

I actually know Tim, and I can guarantee you that he had an honest inspiration -- why not treat email like, well, email? I'm not going to guarantee that a couple rough corners in the forwarded emails were not smoothed over.

It is, after all, politics.

But that Web 2.0 desire to deinstitutionalize communication, and make it more about people -- to show some of the rough edges, to tie trust to people over brand -- that was a breakthrough. And the minute the other campaigns saw it they recognized it. They all began adding plain text emails to their mix, directly from the people involved.

Tim's not a marketer. At least not by traditional standards.

He's, for lack of a better word, an online guy. His background is as a blogger and a video editor. Other stuff.

So why did the idea of sending a plain text forwarded message occur to him, and not the marketing folks?

I'm not sure. But I think it's because a lot of traditional marketing teaches you to do exactly the opposite of what works on the web -- or, as in this case, that traditional background prevents you from adding important tools to your online mix (after all, you are still going to send the traditional email appeals -- you just need to broaden your approach). And until that changes, we'll need the specialized online communications teams.

So starting today I'm the new Interim Director of Technology, College Advancement, Keene State College. I was promoted Friday afternoon to the new position.

I have mixed feelings about this. I was hoping my next major career move would be back into net-enabled learning. It's been almost five years since I left Cognitive Arts, and I have spent much of that time figuring out how I would get back to my passion. I found the recent 20 percent appointment I had with Academic Affairs to assist in the creation of their new Learning and Teaching Technology Plan invigorating, and was hoping to move more in that direction.

This promotion will, temporarily at least, cut into the amount of time I can spend working on net-enabled learning.

Additionally, being webmaster allowed me enough free time that I was able to pursue political blogging. And I had a good deal of success. Blue Hampshire received repeated prominent coverage in the Washington Post, New York Times, and the Boston Globe. The Hill scoured our pages daily, and we even got astroturfed by Hillary's staff. We received feature coverage in Campaigns & Elections magazine and The Wall Street Journal. Laura went on CNN, Dean on Fox, and I did commentary for WCBS in NYC. Our features went even further -- I wrote front page pieces for Huffington Post and syndicated pieces for Newsweek.com. Not bad for a part-time evening and weekend effort.

Oh, and there was this very cool statement:

"Blue Hampshire...has quickly become one of the most influential blogs in the nation."
- Markos Moulitsas, Daily Kos.

But my political blogging will probably go on hiatus for some time as well, given the immensity of the initial challenges the Director position presents (I'll probably do a post a week, but that's it).

All and all, though, I'm excited by the new position though.

Why?

Because the challenges are not wholly divorced from these other pursuits. What is "Advancement Technology" after all?

It's Online Outreach.

It's E-Organizing.

It's plugging into the the Media Machine and learning how to move a story into national media.

It's Grassroots.

It's Fundraising.

It's Issue Advocacy.

It's Public Relations 2.0.

In short, having been on the cutting edge of what is essentially Political Advancement, I find myself in a unique position to try to bring Keene State College toward the state-of-the-art in Institutional Advancement. Some methods are different, but the ultimate goals are the same: build a strong supportive community, raise money, and increase the reputation of the institution. [It's a little different in that you can't raise Keene State's reputation by going negative on Plymouth State -- but I never claimed a perfect analogue ;) ].

In short, the parts of the Director job that are new are closely related to what I have been doing as a side pursuit. And I'm excited by the possibilities there.

In any case, for the next year or so, this blog may shift off of Academic Technology to Advancement issues of public relations and fundraising. We'll still have much of the same focus on using new decentralized community-based approaches to approach these issues, and I hope y'all hang around. It's gonna be a wild ride.

It's important sometimes to realize that while we are blazing new trails in mainstream education, we are really dealing with the dam of industrial culture finally breaking.

We've been paying attention enough to know why it's breaking. We deserve credit for that.

In fact, we've been waiting for it to break.

But the ideas that fuel me (and I think possibly you) aren't as new as most of my colleagues think. What we are looking at is the transference of a hacking culture to a mainstream population. That's the revolution in a nutshell.

Educational institutions need to turn out more hackers. Because it's the hackers, not the planners, that will save this planet.

So while the idea of the "hacker next door" might be novel to our co-workers, the culture is warmly familiar to us. It's decentralized, it values recursion, iteration, intervention. It sees consumer/producer divisions as quaint. It sees five-year-plans as authoritarian and unproductive. It sees the Machine as an extension of Self.

In a way, it was all so predictable.

But I went back and reread Stewart Brand today and, well, if you haven't read his early stuff recently, treat yourself to it. It will take your breath away. The wisdom of crowds, planner vs. hackers, machines as community builders, it's all there.

From Stewart Brand's brilliant 1972 article in Rolling Stone on the playing and creation of SPACEWAR:

Where a few brilliantly stupid computers can wreak havoc, a host of modest computers (and some brilliant ones) serving innumerable individual purposes can be healthful, can repair havoc, feed life. (Likewise, 20 crummy speakers at once will give better sound fidelity than one excellent speaker - try it.)

Spacewar serves Earthpeace. So does any funky playing with computers or any computer-pursuit of your own peculiar goals, and especially any use of computers to offset other computers. It won't be so hard. The price of hardware is coming down fast, and with the new CMOS chips (Complimentary Metal Oxide Semiconductor integrated circuits) the energy-drain of major computing drops to Flashlight-battery level.

Part of the grotesqueness of American life in these latter days is a subservience to Plan that amounts to panic. What we don't intend shouldn't happen. What happens anyway is either blamed on our enemies or baldly ignored. In our arrogance we close our ears to voices not our rational own, we routinely reject the princely gifts of spontaneous generation.

Spacewar as a parable is almost too pat. It was the illegitimate child of the marrying of computers and graphic displays. It was part of no one's grand scheme. It served no grand theory. It was the enthusiasm of irresponsible youngsters. It was disreputably competitive ("You killed me, Tovar!"). It was an administrative headache. It was merely delightful.

Yet Spacewar, if anyone cared to notice, was a flawless crystal ball of things to come in computer science and computer use:

1. It was intensely interactive in real time with the computer.


2. It encouraged new programming by the user.


3. It bonded human and machine through a responsive broadband interface of live graphics display.


4. It served primarily as a communication device between humans.


5. It was a game.


6. It functioned best on, stand-alone equipment (and diarupted multiple-user equipment).


7. It served human interest, not machine. (Spacewar is trivial to a computer.)


8. It was delightful.

In those days of batch processing and passive consumerism (data was something you sent to the manufacturer, like color film), Spaccwar was heresy, uninvited and unwelcome. The hackers made Spacewar, not the planners. When computers become available to everybody, the hackers take over. We are all Computer Bums, all more empowered as individuals and as co-operators. That might enhance things ... like the richness and rigor of spontaneous creation and of human interaction ... of sentient interaction.

Treat yourself, and go read the whole article now. It should be required reading for anybody going into learning technology.

From email from my co-worker, Jenny Darrow:

I’ve done some thinking about the physical space that we will need to promote and support technology and engagement pedagogies. I’m concerned that our emphasis has been so focused on learning, teaching, and curriculum that we’ve been delinquent in addressing physical space requirements....

She goes onto link to Stanford's Wallenberg Hall classrooms as examples of new design thinking, which I think is exactly right.

What does Wallenberg replace the traditional classroom with? Reconfigurable space combined with media infrastructure. Few assumptions about what your class will be, but many features that can help it be what you want. Here's how they put it (emphasis mine):

We have already addressed some of these issues with a new type of classroom design that allows learners and instructors to control the configuration of their environment. Next we propose to integrate this type of room with other learning spaces to form “flexible agenda spaces” designed to adapt, moment-to-moment to the activity requirements of the user community.

To put it even more precisely, the design avoids planning in favor of an environment that encourages hacking.

It's strange how all these things come together. For programmers, it's small pieces loosely coupled. For architects it's reconfigurable space. For graphics people, it's the move from "design" to "style".

The upshot everywhere seems to be that design is always perfect for last year's ideas. But last year's ideas are not what keeps us moving forward.

If you want to keep moving forward, you're going to have to hack your space. Metaphorical or not.

Might be time to get off Facebook, depending on the level of violation you feel about the recent Beacon revelations.

Far more interesting to me though is Cory Doctrow's observation that you are going to want to get off Facebook at some point anyway, no matter how much you like it. As he points out we shed our skin quite a few times in real-life, so who the hell wants a persistent identity?

 It's not just Facebook and it's not just me. Every "social networking service" has had this problem and every user I've spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that's why these services are so volatile: why we're so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace's loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It's socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list -- but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who'll groan and wonder why we're dumb enough to think that we're pals).

That's why I don't worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go -- and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history.

What Cory is onto here fascinates me -- because it's not only that creepy guy friending you that's the problem.

Life, or at least modern American life,  is built around the possibility of the social reboot. We move constantly, change jobs frequently, and keep only the relationships worth keeping from those previous locations. We get to redefine ourselves to some extent, by shedding our social skin. We don't always have to be what we were in our hometown, or college, or first job. We can throw away a whole set of the expectations around us with a simple job or location hop. When we start to feel a little too hemmed in, that's often exactly what we do.

And whether or not we admit it, most of us love the freedom.

In modern American life, persistent identity is the exception, not the norm, the province of your brother and Mom, not your friends.

In fact, if I were to define Family, I'd define it as that social application that you can't fix by rebooting. Which is a joy and a burden, of course.

But the problem is in a persistent identity network everybody becomes family. You can't escape them. You can't reboot your locale or your job. You have to blog as a Democrat and have your Republican high school friends read it. You have to deal with the people that will forever remember you as the guy that did the funnel of Wild Irish Rose in Fiske Hall. You have to tell all your Catholic school buddies that your now an atheist instead of just letting that one quietly slip under the radar.

I'm with Cory. The best feature of Facebook is I know at some point I'll be out of it. God save us from persistent identity societies, and long live the social reboot.

Little bit of a Great Harmonic Google Convergence going on here. Jon Udell mentions in passing his rise and fall from the top of the "Jon" results. Stephen Downes replies in a amusing comment that he defeated Stephen King and Stephen Hawking -- only to be conquered by the last of the Norman Kings.

Meanwhile, my colleague at KSC, Jenny Darrow, writes a somewhat frustrated post about people not understanding it's content and connection that will make them findable on Google -- not some secret technical voodoo.

Her response to those that complain their sites are not ranked highly?

I’m not a guru in web analytics but I can tell you a few things that might help you get a higher rank.

Write. Update. Contribute. Link. Reciprocate. Did I mention write?

And she's right, of course.

I'm no Jon or Stephen, but I've slowly floated up past my "Caulfield" namesakes. And while I've always known I'd never displace my good friend Holden, I've left others in the dust: Patrick Caulfield, Pop Artist. Brian Caulfield, Tech Writer for Forbes. Several CEOs. Many VPs. The secondary sites of Emma Caulfield, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer star.

The MANY secondary sites of Emma Caulfield, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer star.

And just a couple weeks ago, I finally made it on to the first page. And I was pretty chuffed with myself.

But here's the thing. Click to the second page of Google results. Five spaces behind me is my wife, an artist. Apart from getting the URL with her name in it, what did she do? She did her art, but she opened it up to the world. She showed pieces half finished, talked about her technique. She hooked into a vibrant community of practice. She announced new posts on a behind the scenes Google Group she's on with other artists. She invited feedback. She acted (sometimes) on the feedback. She shared unreservedly her progress with her technique, and kept nothing hidden.

Was she trying to rank highly? Not at all. She was trying to have a conversation about what she did right and what she did wrong, and trying to figure out better ways of doing it. In the process, through quickly absorbing what other people in her community of practice already knew about the medium of colored pencil work, and by making a creative leap past that (once again, guided by this community), she's invented a new colored pencil technique (involving the use of pastelboard) which allows her to get painterly effects in a fraction of the time standard colored pencil techniques allowed.

How revolutionary is the process? Ann Kullberg, Queen of the Colored Pencil World, said she was absolutely shocked at how much the method improved rendering speed (you have to understand the colored pencil artists are used to putting in as many as 50-100 hours on a work -- Nicole can render similar effects in as little as a day, and often with increased vibrancy not traditionally associated with colored pencil).

Ultimately, her new technique represents an incremental step. But it's an incremental step from precisely the very edge of a community's knowledge, and that's what makes the difference. Nicole has amazing natural talent, but she was able through the network of an online community to do what she does better. She was able to get support for what she did, feedback from artists and buyers, technique advice from experts in the field.

And now she's number fifteen on the Google "Caulfield" results.

But at this point, that's really beside the point, isn't it?

The fact that you're not ranked highly on Google is not a problem. It's a symptom. It's a sign that you are not taking advantage of the Networked Age for professional development or communication.

Fix that, and leave the Google results to heaven.

Sony set out to be the iTunes of book-publishing with its Sony Reader. And Sony built a pretty good technical and marketing replica of that iPod model -- with an initial online offering that was comparable to Apple's initial limited selection, with a desktop piece of software clearly modeled on the iTunes client, with redistribution deals with a number of publishers, and at the center a top notch piece of hardware.

And this week, as Amazon released the Kindle, the Sony Reader became a paperweight. The Kindle sports about 100,000 titles compared to Sony's 10,000. And that makes all the difference -- it's the difference between thinking of books you want to read and finding electronic versions available and having to browse what's available to find out what you can read.

Nobody wants to buy an ebook device with less titles than their local bookstore. That's just insane.

All the same, I can't help thinking of a major flaw in Sony's "iPod for books" formulation of their strategy.

Here's what they missed. When the iPod first came out, people were not primarily loading it up with stuff from iTunes. The majority of people's collections came from either rips of their own CDs or from so-called piracy (I prefer filesharing, but whatev).

An iPod made sense because if iTunes didn't have what you wanted you could get it by hook or crook.

It occurred to me yesterday that if there had been a vibrant book piracy market, the Sony Reader would have been an easy sell. There would be a huge base. If one could grab a copy of I, Robot or Confederacy of Dunces for free off of a BitTorrent site, you wouldn't hesitate to get a Reader -- and the market penetration of the device would then (as with the iPod) start to drive legal sales.

But every month I would look to see if the book my book club was reading was available on the Sony Reader, and every month it was not. Not once.

And with no filesharing market to turn to for unofficial copies, I had to go to physical alternatives.

Well, you might say, at least the author got something out of that. At least the author got paid.

Nope, sorry. Didn't happen. Like most people I know nowadays I use Amazon to order secondhand copies from people around the country. The author didn't get a dime, and neither did the publisher -- I ordered these books secondhand.

I think the Kindle is going to be a big hit, because of a number of design choices they made, but even more because only Amazon has the real force to make the industry wake up. Oh, and 100,000 titles on launch doesn't hurt either.

But as they move forward, it might be good for both Amazon and the publishers to realize it often takes a little unauthorized use to jumpstart an industry -- at least until the gaps are filled in. That's the real lesson of the iPod, and one that Sony apparently missed.