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Some Thoughts on Twitter (University Social Media Ban Conclusion)
This is Maura Thomas from RegainYourTime.com. This is the conclusion of my interview with Charles Palmer, the Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Entertainment & Learning Technologies, of Harrisburg University of Science & Technology. Please click the link at the top of the page to read the earlier parts.
Please click below to hear the transcript: Some Thoughts on Twitter
MT: What’s your Twitter handle so I can follow you?
CP: Oh it’s easy, “CharlesPalmer.”
MT: Ok, mine is MNThomas, so you can watch for me.
CP: Ok
MT: I thought Twitter was the creepiest thing when I first heard about it, when I first joined.
CP: I’m the same way but then I found that, you know, a lot of…I work in the entertainment and educational realm and a lot of the people whose opinions I value…we ping questions back and forth…If there’s something I don’t know, I have no problem with putting a quick tweet out saying, “hey, has anyone used this software before, does it work?” You know, those sorts of things. And when you talk about creating your own community and then you become a…I don’t know…uber-user and maybe a…let’s see…a specialist in one particular area within that community, it really makes the entire community rich.
MT: I agree.
CP: So yeah, I fell in love with Twitter just because of that.
MT: Yeah, I’m definitely a convert. I spent about 6 months hating it and not understanding it, but then once I really embraced it…also I think when I started…I joined in October of 07, and I think people weren’t really using it very well back then.
CP: Right, yeah.
MT: But I think it’s definitely matured, and the users have matured, and the technology has made it easier to access, and…
CP: Yeah, it’s no longer about hooking up….it’s no longer about hooking up and putting up drunk pictures up. You know, it’s now actually using it another way.
MT: Exactly. Exactly. Well thank you very much for your time.
CP: You are very welcome! Alright, bye.
MT: Bye.
This is Maura Thomas from RegainYourTime.com. This is part two of my interview with Charles Palmer, the Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Entertainment & Learning Technologies, of Harrisburg University of Science & Technology. Please click the link at the top of the page to read earlier parts.
Please click below to hear the transcript, and come back tomorrow and in the coming days to read or listen to the rest of the interview.
MT: Well before…I’m dying to hear about this…that kind of feedback and those results…can you tell me a little bit about how the idea came about? Was there a specific…was there a catalyst? Or did it just sort of come out of a discussion?
CP: There was sort of a catalyst. Our provost, Eric Darr, Dr. Eric Darr, Eric Darr was thinking about this for a while, but he said one day he was sitting there watching his daughter, and she had multiple chat windows open, her iphone was on, she was listening to music, she was, no, her iphone was on for another session, she was streaming Pandora, she was watching TV, and FaceBook open as well. Doing all these things and just looking at her…I’m sorry?
MT: How old is his daughter?
CP: Oh, she is 16.
MT: 16, ok.
CP: Yeah, and this…just this idea of “holy heck, she is really engaged in all these things, but what is the level of that engagement, and how meaningful are some of those conversations that she’s having. Is multitasking true? Can people really carry on quality engagements at that level, at that frequency.” So his idea was, well, our students do that at the university. What if they didn’t have access to that? What would that mean for them personally? And what would that mean for them as a student at a highly technical university?
MT: The goal, at least as I read about it, the goal was to challenge the student body to think about their…and probably the faculty as well, to think about their reliance on social media?
CP: Exactly.
MT: Is that an accurate statement as a goal?
CP: Yeah, yeah, exactly. How does it impact your daily life, and is it the best way of going about some of those things.
MT: Do you have a specific plan to measure that goal?
CP: We use the word “experiment” extremely lightly. This was more of just “hey, let’s get together, let’s think about this, let’s try this little thing, because we’re a smaller university and…quite frankly, most of the larger…I can’t think of another university that could do it for an entire week, just shut everything off like we did.
MT: Did you just block FaceBook, or did you take away…you take away internet access, right?
CP: No, we blocked all the ports that the social networking applications use. So, there are certain ports that FaceBook will hit on a firewall, and Twitter, and YouTube, and some of the chat, instant messaging softwares, they hit particular ports on the firewall, so those were just turned off. And LinkedIn, LinkedIn was probably a huge one that people didn’t expect.
MT: Ok, so you still had internet access, you just blocked access to…primarily social media.
CP: Exactly.
MT: Ok. Do you think that that goal, of challenging people to think about it, to think about their reliance, and the way that they communicated, was achieved?
CP: It was, yeah, we had a three focus groups, or two focus groups after the event, to try and find out what people thought about it, how it reallly impacted their day-to-day life. We figured about 15% of our students actually engaged in the…abstinence is sort of a better word, of social media. As as I said earlier, that’s not including of course those students who walked down the street to get access, or couldn’t wait to get home to get online. But we did have a number of people who really did just stay away from it. And we had a number of students who said, “you know what, it didn’t impact my daily life that much…I’m not tweeting, I’m not a big FaceBook user that I need to be accessing it all the time.”
MT: Did you ask them?
CP: Yes, we had a focus group…
MT: No, I mean did you ask them to refrain during the ban?
CP: Yes.
MT: Ok.
CP: Yes, so it was “hey students, there is this ban that’s going on in the building…” There were a lot of emails and a lot of conversation that went on and we’d love to hear your response. They all knew that in a couple of our GenEd courses they were going to have a write a paper on the experience at the end of it. So I think that’s why we got a number of students who really refrained from it. We asked, we didn’t sort of say, “hey, you must. We can limit you in the building but you can do whatever you want outside of the building.” And, you know, as Jimmy Kimmel said, most of our students have smartphones. So…
MT: Right.
CP: That doesn’t really hinder that usage except inside of the classroom. Which was one of the things of interest, of note, that came out of the focus group, was how many students actually use social media in their classes as a means of distraction. Yeah. As a distraction from the lecture that was going on.
MT: Sure.
CP: It’s funny, the provost and I were sitting with a group of students, and one student said, “wow, I really have to pay attention in class now.” We just stared at him. He realized about the time that it actually left his mouth, what he had said, but were just like, “really?”
(Laughing)
Please come back tomorrow for part 3 of my interview with Charles Palmer of Harrisburg University. Thanks for reading!
This is Maura Thomas from RegainYourTime.com. This is part one of my interview with Charles Palmer, the Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Entertainment & Learning Technologies, of Harrisburg University of Science & Technology. Please click the link at the top for an introduction to this interview.
Please click below to hear the transcript, and come back tomorrow and in the coming days to read or listen to the rest of the interview.
MT: So I was just reading up on the Center for Advanced Entertainment and Learning Technologies. It sounds like a really forward-thinking sort of center at the University.
CP: Yeah, we’re trying to really blur the line between education and entertainment. If you can keep the student engaged, you can teach them things. Prior to being here at Harrisburg I was at Carnegie Mellon and worked at a center where that’s pretty much what the focus was on.
MT: That’s great! I guess, before I get into the questions I sent you, I’m interested to know, now that I’ve read a little bit more about this, what you thought about the ban. Were you involved in the decision?
CP: I was not involved in the original decision but I was brought up to speed well before it went out into the public and just to get ideas and what we could do with it and I have to say, when it first came about, all I could think of was students with pitchforks and faculty saying that they were going to leave the university as soon as they could, but I was pleasantly surprised at how many people actually embraced it or it didn’t really affect them, in some ways.
MT: So you thought that there would be sort of a backlash on the part of the students but it didn’t happen…
CP: I think so because if you think of students in general, anytime they get a chance to bash something and voice their opinion, they will, and not in a bad way, but you know, they’re at that age group where they want to be heard and they want their opinion to be known. So yeah, I really did expect more students to have a problem with it.
MT: Do you think that the fact that it was an experiment, and they knew that it was going to end in a week had anything to do with…
CP: Well, yeah, there are two reasons that made it palatable to them…it was the fact that yes, it was only for a week, for five days, so hey I can do anything for five days.
MT: Right…
CP: And the fact that banning it, we were banning it from our academic center, but that doesn’t stop our students from going home, or walking to the local coffee shop and getting online there.
MT: So the academic center, did that include the dorms?
CP: We actually don’t have dorms.
MT: You don’t have dorms, ok, so you’re a commuter school.
CP: We don’t have dorms, right, the majority of our students live within a five block or so…there are other facilities here that students rent apartments from, but we don’t…for another year we won’t have dorms. So you know, there are all those things that have to come into play to where someone…we’re really talking about a student saying, “ok, I guess I can stop doing this for 6 hours a day.”
MT: Right.
CP: As opposed to how the media made it sound like it was…seven days of no access. But even then it was really bizarre…how many students could not be six hours away from some of these outlets.
MT: How did you see evidence of that? What kind of things did you see?
CP: Well, we did…throughout the week I sat down and the Provost and I we would sit down with different students and talk to them about how it was going…I brought it up as topics of discussion in my classes. And you get anecdotal evidence of stories of a handful of students that will walk two blocks down the street the hotel, the Hilton hotel, and would sit in the lobby and use the free wireless, which I find very funny because we get students that won’t walk two flights of stairs without taking an elevator between classes. But they find that they can walk all the way…walk two blocks down to get online just to check to see what was going on on FaceBook…you know, what were they missing out on? That was the most common thing that people said, was, “I felt like I was missing out on something.”
MT: Do you think that FaceBook is the primary internet resource that the students use, or at least the one that they miss the most?
CP: Socially, yes. That’s their social outlet and we as an institution completely understand that. It’s not that we were anti-FaceBook at all, it’s just that we wanted to bring light to our students, really we did not expect the media attention we got, but we really wanted our students to think about what these technologies meant to them and how it affected their means of communication. So, we have a number of students that have friends from back home or from high school and that’s their main way of keeping in touch is through FaceBook and letting everyone know where the party is this weekend, or “hey check out this photo of Guido that I took the other day,” that sort of thing and sort of really embracing their own community that they’ve created. Their digital community, the people outside of their circle of physical friends, if you will. So it was really interesting how the conversations changed, then, once we had that bit of their day-to-day lives turned off, for a short period of time and how many student actually came back and said “hey, we were having conversations with other students in the hall. Go figure. I don’t have to text someone to have a conversation.”
MT: Right.
Please come back tomorrow for part 2 of my interview with Charles Palmer of Harrisburg University. Thanks for reading!
Yesterday I gave some information about differences in social media platforms Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace, and gave a couple of analogies to help you to keep your use of them in perspective.
Something else to consider when evaluating social media is WHY are you thinking about it? Business? Pleasure? Some combination? Your goals will help dictate how much time you may want to devote to it. Also, what tools do you have available to access it? Are you at a desk with a computer all the time? (Convenient, but very easy to waste time.) If you’re away from a computer much of the time throughout the day, do you have a handheld device where your interface is easily accessible, or will you have to spend evenings and weekends trying to stay active? Evaluate whether this is an effective, and welcome, use of your “down” time.
Whether you’re using a computer or a handheld device to access your social media, I suggest that you use “clients” and “aggregators.” A “client” is a 3rd party application that simplifies the data you receive so that you can review it more quickly, and an “aggregator” lets you send and receive information from several services at once (Ping.fm which I mentioned yesterday is an aggregator for sending information. Tweetie is a client that I like for Twitter.)
Once you have a client, you can program it so that you see exactly what you want to see immediately, and let’s discuss what you’re likely to be looking for. First, are there people you are following whose updates you don’t want to miss, such as prospects, competitors, experts in your industry, or good friends? If so, dedicate a window or a column to each of those people. Also, reading your “current” stream is helpful, which is the most recent page of updates from all the people you are connected with. In addition to Tweetie, Tweetdeck is another client that makes it easy to do both of these simultaneously and there are several others.
What else should you care about? Well, you definitely want to keep an eye on what’s called your “vanity stream.” This means tracking anytime your name or your company or product name is mentioned anywhere on a social media platform. Tweetie, for example, makes it easy to search for “at-replies” (@replies), meaning anytime someone addresses something to you or otherwise mentions you in a “Tweet” (update, or post). The Facebook app for iPhone also alerts you to “notifications,” which is essentially the same thing, but on Facebook instead of Twitter.
The next thing that you want to check is private messages to you. In Twitter these are called “DMs” (direct messages). In most of the other platforms, these messages appear in your inbox in your account, such as in Facebook and LinkedIn.
One last thing you might be interested in, is what new people are now “following” you or “friending” or otherwise connecting with you (getting your updates or wanting your updates)? And which of those do you want to reciprocate/allow/accept?
I know this seems like a lot, but honestly if you have the right tools, you can do it all in just a few minutes at a time.
One warning I will give you about Facebook if you are concerned about wasting time is to stay away from the games and the quizzes. They just eat up too much time with nothing good received in return. The one exception is the RippleTag FaceBook app created by my friend Steve Harper. This is a great way to find connection points with people in your network.
Like all of the communication tools before them, these social media applications take some time to learn and to incorporate into your life, so that you can evaluate them for yourself. It’s my belief that ignoring them for as long as you can is not the most efficient way of dealing with them. You might as well jump in, especially now that you have some advance knowledge, and see what you think, because they are not going away anytime soon. They will either be enjoyable and useful, or not. And if they are not, that’s probably ok.
If you have other ideas, I’d love for you to share them in the comments. Thanks for reading!
Everyone is giving advice about social media, and it’s a topic I get asked about a lot. I’ve shared some information before, in this post and this post. Certainly you can ask 10 different people questions about social media, and get 10 different answers. I don’t think the rules have become entirely apparent yet. But here are some thoughts on participating in social media without it becoming a complete time sink.
For purposes of this post, when I talk about social media, I am referring mainly to Twitter and Facebook, but certainly the principles apply to the others as well, such as LinkedIn and MySpace. My take on these four is that LinkedIn is basically an online résumé, and MySpace is more relevant for creatives like artists and musicians. Facebook seems to be a social tool for most people, but increasingly a mix of both business and personal for entrepreneurs and business owners. Twitter and Facebook are growing more similar, although Twitter (thankfully) doesn’t have all the games and other distractions. It’s just people communicating with each other. A lot of people ask me about Twitter versus Facebook. My opinion is that there is much more useful information being shared on Twitter than on Facebook. On Facebook, there are still too many people sharing what they had for breakfast, and giving me their score in Mafia Wars, and telling me which Desperate Housewife they are most like. All of these Facebook games and applications make for many distractions. I’ve connected with more old friends from my past on Facebook than on Twitter, which has been fun. But I’ve made more new friends and gained more exposure for my business on Twitter, so there are pros and cons to both. I have a presence on Facebook and I check it periodically, but my Twitter stream seems much more relevant to my life and my business. Facebook is nice for keeping up with friends and family. When I send an update, I often use Ping.fm so it posts to both Twitter and Facebook, but that’s because I’m connected with mostly different people on each.
I have two analogies that help me relate social media to newbies. Both of these were created out of conversation with my friend CJ Romberger. The first is that you can think of these social media platforms as a crystal-clear, flowing stream on a hot day. The water is fantastic but you have to accept that you will never touch every drop. You’ll jump in, swim around a bit, and then get out and the water will continue to flow by without you. And that’s ok.
The second analogy is that Twitter and Facebook, for instance, are kind of like great parties, where lots of interesting people are discussing lots of interesting things, all the time. The party is fabulous but sometimes you have to be ok with leaving and doing other things for a while.
Tomorrow I’ll add information about things to consider when evaluating social media, and how to interact with it productively and efficiently. Please check back and you are welcome to follow me on Twitter @mnthomas, where I try to post useful productivity information. Thanks for reading!
How do you keep up with social media? How do you find the time? I get asked some version of this question every day, and in fact I deliver trainings on the topic. The tools you choose to use have a huge impact on how well you can keep up with the flood of communication caused by engaging in social media. I don’t think I’d be as active (or at all active) on social media if it weren’t for my iPhone. My iPhone gives me the ability to check in on Facebook & Twitter at random moments in the day, like waiting in the drive through for coffee, waiting in line at the supermarket, waiting for a meeting to start…any idle moment that comes along gives me the opportunity, if I so choose, to check my Tweet stream or my Facebook news with just the click of a button. (I use Tweetie on my iPhone for Twitter and Facebook’s own app for Facebook). I haven’t looked lately to see if these apps are as user-friendly on a Blackberry or other devices, but I can tell you that an iPhone makes it super-easy.
This convenience can have a downside, however, if I don’t control it. First, I don’t have any alarms set on my iPhone to alert me when I have new Tweets or Facebook notifications. That would be endlessly distracting. But still, if I’m not careful, this “convenience” could rob me of any time for idle thought. And we, as a society, already don’t take enough time for just thinking. It’s nice to have those idle minutes to take a couple of deep breaths, look around, take in the scenery, and let my mind wander. It’s important to allow time in your day for this, at least. Even better if you can carve out some real thinking time in your day. Ten minutes? 15? How about 30 minutes to sit someplace quiet, without a phone or computer, and see where your mind takes you.
My iPhone adds a huge amount of convenience to my life, and allows me to keep up with things I find enjoyable. No question. But also be sure you’re in control of the technology, and that it’s not running your life.
I’ll leave you with a quote shared with me by my friend Connie Brubaker, which I love:
“A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually.
One must fight for a life of action, not reaction.”
– Rita Mae Brown
Thanks for reading!