Techvolution

At the beginning of the semester I defined technology as, "Anything not found in nature – be it made by man, animal, alien, machine or whatever – that changes lives in some way." I stand by that definition, but it's evolving.

That blog focused on technology’s potential to change education. While I remain interested in hands-on gadgetry, I’ve come to see that technology is everything. There is little in life that remains perfectly natural.

Driving to school on a Monday morning I made the usual Starbucks stop. I pulled in, checked the GPS unit to see how many miles I had left between that stop and school (apparently I have a subconscious hope the number will change one day), grabbed my PDA phone and jumped out of the car. Halfway to the building, I remembered I didn’t lock the doors, so I pushed the button on my key without missing a step.

After startling a few blackbirds out of their oily watering puddle, I went inside to find about half a dozen stereotypical middle-aged workmen. All were grungy and good-natured, several had mullets and all had southern accents. These were the Bubbas and Juniors of my lower middle class suburb. As I scrolled through my to-do list in my phone, they guys joked with one of the baristas about tipping. One of them said, with what had to be the thickest drawl in Texas, “Don’t buy Lucent.”

How the heck would some cattle rancher/construction worker type know what to or not to buy in the stock market? Well, technology. No longer are stocks the high-dollar equivalent to a magic eight ball for people off Wall Street. Now, we check the newspaper, listen to the radio or log into our favorite day-trading Web sites. Thanks to technology, these guys are not held to stereotypes by their careers.

In the few miles between my house and Starbucks, I encountered a car, GPS, Wi-fi, oil, glass, red-light cameras, free enterprise, mass-production coffee and tea, and stock trading. And that was before I actually started my day.

Once at school, I looked up a student who had passed away over the weekend. Facebook gave his friends and classmates the chance to grieve openly on this wall. The social networking program even allowed him to make new friends after he had passed.

Thanks to the cold weather, I was layered with man-made fibers and a coat. I was safe from fire with the flame retardant chemicals required in each layer. The heat was on, so layers started to peel away fairly quickly. I considered getting a flu shot, but remembered I hate needles more than missing classes. I’ll let my natural defenses take care of that one.

I wrote the stories to consider that day on the dry-erase board and erased those that had come in. I studied books printed with machinery and bound by glue instead of thread. I printed papers on a laser printer after running them through the spell check program a final time.

By lunchtime, I walked (there’s some nature) to the deli on campus and bought lunch – probably a grilled cheese sandwich and Dr. Pepper - with my credit card, which the cashier swiped through her machine. Given the preservatives in soda, cheese, bread and even butter, I won’t count anything I consumed that day as natural. Technology improves the shelf life of everything I eat late in a semester.

I studied with some fellow students – all on our laptops – and researched a paper before walking (there’s that nature again) back to my car and heading home, where I used resin-heavy fatwood to ignite a fire (with real wood, as far as I know) in which I threw chemically treated pine cones to make the flames blue and green.

In a single day, I encountered at least a dozen technological uses that I regularly take for granted. Yes, technology is anything not found in nature that changes our lives. But it’s evolving. For me, technology IS my life. The little bits of nature I encounter stand out in the sea of technological existence.

After a semester discussing technology in our world, I realize that between preservatives, flame-retardant fibers, navigation systems and wireless information at my fingertips, I’ve reached a point that to function in nature would change my life more than using technology does. I now realize that I’ve evolved to the point that technology is the rule, nature the exception.

Devolving America's language culture

In American culture, we use language from all over the world. Business signs are a great indicator. Traveling along Belt Line from 30 you see English signs for a few blocks, then Spanish for a few more. Keep going and it’s back to English again, but they change to Chinese as you move to the heart of Richardson. Then there is Vietnamese, and back to English around Central. All that without leaving the Metroplex. We handle language just fine. So why can’t we handle what George Carlin called those “seven dirty words”?

Perhaps it is because, at some point, we placed importance on them. They signified hostility, agitation or disappointment. They let us know when we were in trouble and when we should rethink our positions on issues. But do they still hold that function? Bono’s outburst on the Golden Globes wasn’t hostile. He was genuinely excited. And in a promise not to do it again, he hit the nail on the head when he told Reuters, "If you use them in your everyday speech, sometimes they will come out. I don't mean to offend anyone."

There it is. Daily use desensitizes us to the original effects of certain words. Cursing like a sailor is fine in a boat full of sailors, but brining that language into the public domain is tricky. We aren’t always aware, or don’t always care, who hears us when we are out with our friends on the weekend. But we know who’s listening to the news, prime time television and the radio. Everyone, that’s who. Sure, certain shows come on later than kids should be awake and shock jocks rant during the morning commute, but everyone hears it. The toddler in the back seat picks up fun new uses for the phonics she learned in her pre-K class. And Grandma never would have let anyone say half the things to her that she hears during her evening television shows.

So, why do we care? It appears we don’t. Where lines of respect once stood between us and our vocabulary choices, now there are open spaces waiting for “f-bombs” to reign down. Some people claim language is evolving, but reducing it to the seven dirty words is devolution if it’s anything. We don’t care enough to try and find vocabulary to accurately describe our feelings. It’s so much easier to drag and old word out of the restricted bag and re-appropriate it to fit the given situation. Evolution implies moving forward, which in this case would be creating or learning new words. Instead, we are moving backward and reusing the old ones with no regard for whom we bother. And according to the FCC, that’s just fine.

SMU Chipotle ads

Check out these Chipotle ads on YouTube. SMU students made them and are in direct competition with colleges around the country for cash prizes. It's a bit of marketing genius on Chipotle's part, because the ad with the most attention by Nov. 17, 2006 gets a bonus prize. As an SMU student, I want to support my fellow students as much as possible, so everyone click and send them to your friends. It would be great if our teams won best ad AND most popular. Post them to every blog and message board you know.

***Update 3NOV2006 - Well, the SMU guys won best ad with "The Wall." Now for most viewed....

***Update 7NOV2007 - there is only ONE video ahead of us, and we both have over two million hits... get to clicking and SMU can take it all....

I think I'm in love with Grace...

MSN ran a story about Grace in October 2006. She's smart, responsible, helpful and sleek. Oh, and she's a house. Microsoft's vision of the future, although now closed for remodeling, is about the most wonderful house I can imagine. (Thank goodness their teams are more imaginative than I.)

Yes, Microsoft has given me a goal. I will have a house with which I can talk, cook and bond. It's just that cool.

Guest speakers aren't just for class anymore

There was a time when missing a guest speaker meant borrowing notes and hoping whoever you got them from found importance in what you would have had you been there. But "times, they are a'changin'." When Patrick Seitz, Business and Technology reporter for Investors' Business Daily, visited campus October 18 and 19, students and instructors worked to document his message.

No, students didn't climb over each other to make it to class any more than they would for any other speaker. And yes, a few even took the opportunity to catch up on whatever they do when not in class, but that doesn't automatically keep them from accessing the information. Thanks to iPods, cameras, and the Internet students can listen to Seitz's lectures and see his interviews.

His lectures focused on technology reporting, what he can do as a reporter, his beat, etc. to give students an inside look at working for IBD. Given the subject matter, I, of course, found myself in another O'Neal Smitherma "fan-girl" moment, but I was more taken by the ability for others to have the same experience. (Not that everyone is as taken with tech talk as I.) In addition to his in-class lectures, Seitz agreed to an on-camera interview, appeared on the Daily Update and had lunch with students interested in technology and business reporting. And it's all available for students to download and review at their leisure. What does this say about possibilities for the future of education?

We already use Blackboard to take tests, submit assignments and communicate with classes and instructors. Some professors post Podcasts before lectures to prepare classes or to review test results without using class time. The University of Michigan-Ann Arbor's School of Dentistry, Stanford-Palo Alto and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have already signed on as iTunes universities. SMU is in the process of joining the ranks, if the contracts ever move out of legal. With all this tech, is there any reason to come anymore? Well, yes, of course there is. If nothing else, you can't ask questions if you aren't there. But for guest speakers, this is great.

We should still attend classes with guest speakers, but their knowledge is now open to other students without interrupting classes or overfilling rooms. Is a speaker coming to campus during your physics test? If all goes well, this won't be a problem. We'll be able to download the audio, video and stories from SMUDailyData.com and you can have both. While this system isn't fully in place, it holds incredible potential. No longer do we need the official university photographer to post his shots on the school's official Website. Now students, instructors or the speakers themselves can document the visit.

Imagine the crossover potential. Now, if a local business owner comes to campus to speak to a journalism class, the journalism department knows and students come in if they can. But if fully recorded, the message can extend to all journalism students, cross over to business students, any public speaking classes, and so on. The possible benefit is huge.

Seitz was interesting to me, and anyone curious about him can listen to his lectures, watch his interview and check out the October 19 Daily Update to make their own determination.

MySpam.com… So what?

After reading Trent Lapinski’s “MySpace: The Business of Spam 2.0 (Exhaustive Edition)” I can’t stop wondering what all the hubbub is about. Sure, some questionable men used questionable marketing techniques. Yes, Tom is more than a nerd at a keyboard – he’s a nerd at a keyboard with a multi-million dollar job. And there is no denying the template for MySpace was borrowed at best. But really, what is the big deal?

Questionable men, questionable marketing
All right, I was a little taken aback by felony charges and semi-hostile takeover talk, but I’m not the most business minded person. For all I know, that’s standard operating procedure in the big leagues. Look at Enron. And I felt a bit lied to when I read that creators intentionally made up a story to hide their intentions. But I was more interested in how far off that made up story was from the one I originally heard – that the site was created as a way for bands to communicate with fans. According to Lapinski, the agreed upon story was that Tom stumbled into creation in some serendipitous event. He doesn’t offer further details, but according to his article, the public doesn’t want them.

So what about marketing MySpace as a networking tool when it is actually a spam machine? Well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see ads on every page. Banners across the top, eye-catching movement to the right and left, occasional sounds, etc. bring innumerable companies to the user’s attention. Duh… someone is paying for this sucker. But it is still a social network. No matter how many ads run in the background, the public wouldn’t sign in just to watch them. We (yes, I’m a MySpace ho) sign in to keep up with bands, find and e-meet interesting people, keep in touch with our friends and family, or just surf about and indulge our voyeuristic tendencies. And we don’t pay a dime. Who can complain? Certainly not me.

I associate this form of advertising with the television model. We have free shows, but must watch advertisements. Why are we fine with knowing that Toyota will force the biggest sale of the season down our throats during ER or football or whatever? If we hate advertising so much, why haven’t we revolted against the broadcast industry yet? Well, we like our free TV, for one thing. MySpace is no different. I like my social networking to remain free to me. I don’t care who pays for it, as long as I don’t. And I don’t mind a couple of pretty colors moving about while I message my cousins or sister-in-law, either.

Tom – your number one friend
The first person (profile, nerdbot, whatever) to invite new users to add him to their friends lists is Tom Anderson. I must be honest; I never made the connection between Tom and origin. When I signed on to MySpace, I pretty much just ran through the click, click, agree click, click motions until my profile appeared. Lapinski was right; I didn’t care about the company’s history. I didn’t know there was a company. But I didn’t buy Tom as a super genius with the luck of the Irish either. I always looked to him more as the face of tech support. If I ran into problems, it was his face I saw – for better or worse – and it was he who I thought to contact. But I never had problems, so Tom, still on my friends list, has yet to hear from me.

I see Tom’s role in the MySpace PR machine the same way I see any actor’s role in any advertisement. Do I think the Orbit girl really has gleaming teeth that offer a computer graphics sparkle every time she smiles because she chews Orbit? No. I live in a capitalist society. I recognize the necessity of role playing in order to turn a profit. I mean, really, if all that woman in white did was show us gum and tell us it was tasty, we wouldn’t be interested. She is someone with whom consumers can identify, as is Tom.

Borrowed template
Lapinski also raised the issue of MySpace’s originality. I see how borrowing content could bother some – particularly those whose content is borrowed. As a matter of fact, this is the biggest problem for me. But if you consider the timing involved in getting a venture up and running, I don’t see how it is avoidable. Friendster existed, it pushed the tech-geeks (don’t take offense, I stand among those ranks) through the homeostasis issues. But the masses were not ready. By the time a large enough population saw the social network model as advantageous, the MySpace team had already started moving their idea into the Friendster frame. If Friendster had spam-o-vision, they could have done the same thing.

To argue that borrowing a format is grounds for running someone out of business is to say that every department store, fast food chain, gas station, cannery, etc. needs to go. All of them, save the first of each. Oh wait, the first of many businesses fails. Does this mean we no longer need to fill our cars with gas? Or that we no longer need cars, since it’s safe to say that the Durango was not the first SUV, nor was it among the first cars? I love my Mini, and have no intention of telling BMW to stop making it just because they are not John Cooper. Oh no, not this girl. So I can’t very well hold MySpace to different standards just because it operates through the Internet.


Pop-ups
I’ve touched on the advertising thing – free for me, weehee – but I also want to pop-up to other advertising. Pop! There it is again. Remember those? If this company is focusing its energy on placing ads inside the social network framework, it’s a good chance they are not focusing on placing pop-ups elsewhere. If MySpace is designed as a spam machine in which users sign in to view all the spam, sign me up. Heck, if users embrace this we could eventually remove the need for pop-up blockers. It’s a stretch, but thinking in the long term, advertising goes where it will be seen. Logitech, if the company has any logical thinking capability, isn’t going to pay for a pop-up that the only 20 people left without a blocker will see if they can get the same ad to 109 million of Tom’s friends when they log into MySpace. That would be counterproductive. If users show a strong preference for ads through the network, the company in charge may not even need to send e-mail solicitations. Wouldn’t that be nice?


MyDay in MySpace
As a MySpace user, I don’t feel taken advantage of by Tom, Greenspan, random bands, advertisers or even Rupert Murdoch. I log in whenever I can, watch the banner ad while my profile loads, and assimilate at least three ads subconsciously while I run through my messages. I contact the family in California, see who has had babies, who is marrying, divorcing or living in sin, and snoop around a few band profiles. By the time I log out, I’ve seen junk from phone carriers, haunted houses, tax specialists and who knows who else. And I love it! No, I’m not running off in search of advertising, but I appreciate the format. I know the ads will be where they always are. I can tune them out or click on them as I see fit. (Although, I have yet to get over the multi-window pop-up experiences of my pre-MySpace days and don’t generally click on anything.) I have not seen an increase in e-mail spam ads, but I could be lucky. It’s not like my bank, credit cards, grocery store, gas station and university wouldn’t let my e-mail address out to advertisers.

Bringing people what they want and allowing advertisers to pay for it isn’t illegal. It isn’t even irregular. This is what every medium does, so why not a network? My position will probably go against the “stick it to the man” majority, but what else is new? Taking a stance against MySpace’s practices means taking one against everything we have internalized as acceptable advertising in our culture. I, for one, am not ready.

Better education through tech

Technology: Anything not found in nature – be it made by man, animal, alien, machine or whatever – that changes lives in some way.

While most technology is important to society on a large scale, I am concerned with two specific items that are in the position to change education – modern cell phones with integrated PDAs and Blackboard (the program, not the slate). Between the two, education can move from its tree-killing past into an advanced system of communicative learning.

At the end of the spring semester or the beginning of summer (I have no concept of time around finals), I opened an e-mail from one of my English instructors. He sent it to everyone in the class to let us know which books to buy and how to find our fall syllabus on Blackboard. Over the summer, he kept in contact with the class and before we met him, we knew to finish one novel and a PDF chapter from a text he posted to Blackboard. By the time I met him on the first day of class, I had already placed the syllabus, all of the PDF and the online texts into the appropriate folder on the 1-Gig memory card in my phone. From there, I can open the files with various PDF and e-book reading software to view them at my leisure. No more sitting at home under a lamp with 50 lbs. of books and binders. I have everything I need for his class at any given moment with a paperback novel and my phone. Being a pre-tech person, I still mark up the novels and print the texts if I feel I will have excessive notes, but for the most part I have no need of paper outside of taking notes in class. (Notebook PCs solve that problem, but that’s another issue.)

Another instructor e-mailed his class to explain that we had a Pod cast waiting for us and should listen to it before the first session. Again, we all logged into blackboard, downloaded the file and learned enough about the class, the instructor and his views on the topic to attend the first day without any questions about what we would be doing. This instructor didn’t hand out a syllabus, instead left it up to us to check Blackboard and either print it out or bookmark it for future reference.

Yet a third instructor teaches his class nearly paper free. He does assign textbooks, but that’s it. Everything is done online through Blackboard, blogging or e-mail. Outside of class notes, no reason to have paper comes to mind. I downloaded all of his online texts and PDFs on the first day of class. Why print them out if I can carry them in my pocket?

Keeping everything in my PDA phone offers the convenience of text messaging or e-mailing these professors as questions arise. I no longer have to wait until I get home or to the library to finish assignments – the phone has a slide-out keyboard and the ability to communicate with fold-out keyboards via Bluetooth or infrared. Type, save for editing later or send immediately. Between GPRS and Wi-Fi, my options are limitless.

I remember life before this educational power duo. Depending on student reports of instructor personalities and waiting for the first day of classes to determine if the course load would be stressful. Rushing home or to the nearest computer and essentially chaining myself to it to finish an assignment, then rushing back to the professor’s office to turn in an essay. Ugh! I don’t miss those days. Between hearing instructors voices, getting a head start on readings, knowing exactly what to expect from a class and carrying what equates to chapters and articles from 32 different sources on a card that barely fills the space it takes to write “1 Gig memory card,” I am able to prepare for class without chaining myself to a desk. Heck, I can read in line at the grocery store, while waiting on dry cleaning, during lunch or anyplace I like.

I’m not a hugely technical person, but I would definitely consider the PDA phone and Blackboard technology. Neither would exist without humankind’s ability to create outside of nature’s limits, yet both of them are changing my educational process, and in turn, my life.