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Scott Travis // Serving up content from around the web on business, social media and higher education, with the occasional unrelated post to keep you on your toes. As a 2006 Hope College grad and director of alumni & parent relations, I enjoy communicating with Hope alumni and parents for a living. Learn more about my professional life at www.linkedin.com/in/satravis.
Even as a lawsuit over Google's book-digitization project remains up in the air, the search giant has quietly started reaching out to universities in search of humanities scholars who are ready to roll up their sleeves and hit the virtual stacks.
The company is creating a "collaborative research program to explore the digital humanities using the Google Books corpus," according to a call for proposals obtained by The Chronicle. Some of Google's academic partners say the grant program marks the company's first formal foray into supporting humanities text-mining research.
The call went out to a select group of scholars, offering up to $50,000 for one year. Google says it may choose to renew the grants for a second year. It is not clear whether anybody can apply for the money, or just the group that got the solicitation.
The effort seems largely focused on building tools to comb and improve Google's digital library, whose book-search metadata—dates and other search-assisting information—one academic researcher calls a "train wreck." These are some of the sample projects that Google lists in its call for proposals:
• Building software for tracking changes in language over time.
• Creating utilities to discover books and passages of interest to a particular discipline.
• Developing systems for crowd-sourced corrections to book data and metadata.
• The testing of a literary or historical hypothesis through innovative analysis of a book.
For more details of the program, read the full Chronicle story.
A college education is something many people take for granted, but only about 1% of the world actually gets one. A year ago today, YouTube EDU (youtube.com/edu) launched with a very simple mission: deliver some of the world’s greatest university courses to anyone with an Internet connection and a screen.
Whether it’s Salman Rushdie reading poetry by the last mughal king to Emory University students, or a lecture in electrical engineering at UC Berkeley, YouTube EDU has helped some of the oldest institutions on the planet blaze a trail into the 21st century by opening up a rich and empowering corpus of video content to aspiring students everywhere.
YouTube EDU is now one of the largest online video repositories of higher education content in the world. We have tripled our partner base to over 300 universities and colleges, including University of Cambridge, Yale, Stanford, MIT, University of Chicago and The Indian Institutes of Technology. We have grown to include university courses in seven languages across 10 countries. We now have over 350 full courses, a 75% increase from a year ago and thousands of aspiring students have viewed EDU videos tens of millions of times. And today, the EDU video library stands at over 65,000 videos.
We have also rolled out new products to make this coursework more accessible, including adding automated captions and auto-translation to videos spoken in English. In just a few clicks, you can generate captions and translate courses into one of 50 different languages.
At the end of the day, YouTube EDU is about using the democratic nature of the Internet and the power of video to make higher learning accessible to all. We’ve heard from thousands of users like trainerstone, who writes: “Thank you so much for your videos. I live in provincial Philippines and have very little access to the arts and academic stimulus.” But perhaps one user put it best: “This is what the Internet was created for.”
Here’s to another great year of great educational content on YouTube. Until then, keep watching and keep learning.
Obadiah Greenberg, Strategic Partner Manager, recently watched “Khan Academy on PBS NewsHour.”
Thanks Jason Cash for sharing this post via Twitter and for your work setting up Hope's YouTube home at www.youtube.com/hopecollege
Public relations, marketing and advertising are all tied together. The related practices have emerged to create mass market appeal using old methods to reach an audience.
When you examine the fundamental meaning of “public and relations” you can see three things that influence human behavior and market sentiment. The three things are people connecting with knowledge of something or someone.
Corporations historically have adopted PR tactics to manage PR for the benefit of the corporation. However the intentions have flipped from institutional aims to the aims of individuals.
People, internal and external, are now enabled to influence “public relations” because they have been given a “voice” that is loud because the signal is not from one but many. People connected with other people “learn” new knowledge about things corporations do, sell and say. If a corporation does things that aren’t “socially acceptable” then traditional PR practices cannot drown the noise of “people connected and equipped with the knowledge” of what the corporation has done or intends to do.
Good, bad and indifferent whatever “the corporation” does or intends on doing the “people” are listening and have the power to galvanize many to express an opinion on how the corporations actions impact the “public’s relations”. More and more people are voicing their opinion, sharing their knowledge and connecting their voice to many other people inside and outside corporate walls.
The conflict comes when corporations try and use “social media” to extend past “marketing, advertising and PR” practices to manage their “public relations”. These are dangerous practices because the public now influences relations more than traditional PR practices. Subsequently corporations need to not only change their “marketing, advertising and PR” practices but rather the entire ecosystem of the corporation. Why? Because the foundation of any “corporation” rest with what people know.
Individual knowledge about anything is now everyone’s knowledge about everything. Soon everyone’s “knowledge” will become easier to find and use. What impact will that have on “public relations”? Intentions can no longer be hidden behind a mask. Just ask Nestle who is in charge of Public Relations.
Brian Solis coined the term PR 2.0 (Putting The Public Back in Public Relations) in recognition of what is needed to make the transformation. Brian is the foremost thought leader behind these emerging dynamics.
ScottShares.com Discussion: According to this article, "the public now influences relations more than traditional PR practices". How do you see this playing out at your organization? Does this require an entire "ecosystem" overhaul like Mr. Deragon suggests?
Universities have been in the advanced-networking business for years, building systems to ship their scientists' data over the Internet and connecting partners like museums and high schools in the process.
Now the federal government has proposed expanding academe's role in the Internet further, by enlisting institutions in an effort to bring ultra-high-speed access to more community institutions.
The proposal is part of the first-ever federal blueprint for broadband, released this week. The overall goal of the 376-page plan, which covers much more than the proposal involving colleges, is to connect by 2020 the 100 million people who still lack access to broadband.
Now comes the hard part.
By one estimate, only about one-third of the country's 218,000 "community anchor" institutions—such as colleges, libraries, and hospitals—are part of academe's nonprofit networks. Specific details about how the remaining two-thirds might get connected are lacking in the plan, which was devised by the Federal Communications Commission. It's also unclear where the money would come from to buy more big digital pipes.
What's more, the plan could trigger opposition from some commercial Internet companies, says Kenneth D. Salomon, a telecommunications expert who heads the government-relations group at the law firm Dow Lohnes. Those companies "believe they have the capacity and have made the investment to provide this kind of service," he says.
Still, the FCC endorsement represents a victory for academe's networking community, which has pushed hard to shape policy ever since billions of federal dollars were made available for broadband under last year's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Congress had requested the FCC plan, a set of recommendations that do not carry the force of law, as part of the stimulus bill.
In trying to influence that plan, higher-education-technology groups and their allies made the case that private companies had failed to meet the needs of community anchors because the economics of bringing them high-capacity broadband weren't attractive. Instead, the technology groups called for rigging up those anchors with broadband by building on the regional and national networks that colleges have already established. That would be a costly expansion of this infrastructure, one that the research-and-education sector would like to control.
The FCC road map doesn't go so far as to put colleges in the driver's seat, but it does ensure that they'll be along for the ride.
"The higher-education-networking community is being challenged to extend and serve community-anchor institutions," says Glenn Ricart, president and chief executive of National LambdaRail, one of two main national high-speed networks for academic researchers. "How and when that all happens is still to be worked out."
The benefits of extending academe's Internet umbrella are enormous, advocates say. Take one small example: the city of Amsterdam, in upstate New York. Its hospital has "no modern connectivity," says Timothy L. Lance, president and chairman of NyserNet, a networking consortium led by the state's research universities. Modern broadband could be crucial in emergencies, he says, enabling a small hospital to diagnose a traumatic injury by sending high-resolution images quickly and without compression to a distant expert.
"They're going to be saving lives with this technology," says Peter M. Siegel, chief information officer and vice provost at the University of California at Davis.
Athletes on women's basketball teams competing in this year's NCAA Division I tournament graduate at a significantly higher rate than their male counterparts, according to a report released today. The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, at the University of Central Florida, reports that 58 of the 62 women's teams that reported graduation-success rates, or 94 percent, graduated at least 50 percent of their players within six years. That compares with 69 percent, or 44, of the 64 men's teams that reported. The institute released its annual rankings of graduation-success rates and academic-progress rates for the men's teams on Monday.
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Womens-Basketball-Teams-in/21863/
NBC won't win any medals for its coverage of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver this year. Its strategy of withholding online coverage to encourage people to watch on television during prime time appears to be working, though, at least when the Americans win lots of medals. The company is taking a walloping from viewers who object to the network's tape delay of the games, undertaken to sell more expensive ads during at night.
In these hyper-connected times, people are finding out who won a medal before they have a chance to watch, and the immediacy that makes live sports programming so compelling is lost, to an extent. Worse, NBC expects to lose hundreds of millions of dollars televising the Olympics despite this ploy. Before the games got underway, NBC said it expects to lose a quarter of a billion dollars on broadcasting the event, because a weak ad market will fail to offset a whopping $820 million in licensing and production costs.
As for watching the games online, NBCOlympics.com offers a relatively scant selection of live events, about 400 hours according to various estimates. It showed 2,200 hours of live events online from Bejing two years ago. And even if you want to watch what they're showing online, you can only do so if your ISP paid the required licensing fee.
There's no way for you to watch for free if your ISP didn't pay, and we were not able to log in to NBCOlympics.com using our Time Warner password, so in at least one case, a subscriber to an ISP that paid up is not able to watch.
Meanwhile, NBCOlympics.com itself post the results live, well in advance of the taped broadcasts, adding another potential spoiler to an already heady mix. And while you can follow the athletes on Twitter through NBC's website, skier Jake Zamansky used this forum to post "Can't wait to see how bad NBC covers the ski racing today" as noted by Deadspin.
The value of a sports broadcast declines precipitously over time, which is why sports leagues don't have to worry about file sharing networks eroding their businesses the way other video producers do. And that's why so many people are mystified and frustrated by NBC's tape-delay strategy. A quick Twitter search reveals countless viewer complaints and articles about those complaints.
Nonetheless, NBC is sticking to its guns, with vice president of sports communications Chris McCloskey telling the Boston Globe, "You can't please everybody, but we try to serve the greater good."
NBC's attempt to cover the exorbitant cost of broadcasting the Olympics by forcing people to watch during prime time, or not at all, might upset millions of viewers, but it appears to be having the desired effect of boosting ratings when the Americans win.
According to Media Week's Marc Berman, news of Lindsey Vonn's downhill victory spread online in advance of its taped broadcast last night, which is why so many people watched.
Indeed, on Wednesday night, 30.1 million Americans tuned in to watch their countrymen capture six medals, while only 18.4 million watched American Idol during the same hour, according to Nielsen (AP). On Tuesday night, when Americans took home three, American Idol bested the Olympics by 4 million viewers.
See Also:
- Advertisers Looking Beyond NBC Online for Olympics Opportunities
- Olympic Theme Endures Weird Road to Fame
- New Olympic Event: NBC, Yahoo Battle Over the Numbers
- NBC%u2019s Plan for Olympics on Web: Everything But Live Events
- Comcast Buys NBC, Clouding Online TV%u2019s Future
Are you tired of finding out who won online from other sources, and then having to wait to watch? What network could do it better and how?
For years, the sophisticated play of professional teams trickled down to their college and high school counterparts. Recently, that flow has been reversed.
The situation was desperate for the Denver Broncos. On the first Sunday of the National Football League’s 2009 season, with only 28 seconds left in the game, they trailed the Cincinnati Bengals 7-6. The ball was on the 13-yard line — their own 13-yard line. On second down, Broncos quarterback Kyle Orton heaved the ball downfield, only to see a Bengals defender deflect the pass away from the receiver. And then something remarkable, close to miraculous, happened. Instead of falling to the ground, the ball popped into the air and landed in the outstretched arms of Broncos wide receiver Brandon Stokley, who started racing down the field. All across America, in living rooms and basements and sports bars, people broke into cries of wonderment and delight, heartbreak and disbelief.
Then they witnessed something even more startling.
Just before he reached the end zone, with 17 seconds remaining, Stokley cut right at 90 degrees and ran across the field. Six seconds drained off the clock before, at last, he meandered across the goal line to score the winning touchdown. For certain football fans, the excitement of a last-minute comeback now commingled with the shock of the familiar: It’s hard to think of a better example of a professional athlete doing something so obviously inspired by the tactics of videogame football. When I caught up with Stokley by telephone a few weeks later, I asked him point-blank: “Is that something out of a videogame?” “It definitely is,” Stokley said. “I think everybody who’s played those games has done that” — run around the field for a while at the end of the game to shave a few precious seconds off the clock. Stokley said he had performed that maneuver in a videogame “probably hundreds of times” before doing it in a real NFL game. “I don’t know if subconsciously it made me do it or not,” he said.
Brandon Stokley's time-killing run along the goal line was a tactic straight out of videogames.
Today’s football players have an edge that no athletes before them have possessed: They’ve played more football than any cohort in history. Even with the rise of year-round training, full-contact practice time on the field hasn’t increased — in fact, it has actually gone down, as coaches have tried to limit the physical punishment that the game exacts. But videogames, especially the ubiquitous Madden NFL, now allow athletes of all ages to extend their training beyond their bodies.
If you’re, say, an All-American quarterback at a top college program, odds are that you’ve been training on a very sophisticated, off-the-shelf simulator — a cross between a football tutorial and a real-time documentary, drizzled with addictive Skinnerian action-reward mechanics — for as long as you can remember. The many hundreds — even thousands — of hours that athletes put into videogame football give them more game experience (and, as Stokley demonstrated, sometimes more game awareness) than Bart Starr, Terry Bradshaw, or Joe Montana were able to log in previous eras. And there’s the possibility, too, that all this electronic play is changing the structure of their brains, at least in some ways, for the better.
For more than 30 years, sports videogames have been focused on simulating real-life athletics more and more perfectly. But over the past decade, games have moved beyond just imitating the action on the field. Now they’re changing it.
This revolution has sneaked up on many athletes, coaches, and fans. Sports and videogames — a combination that was one of the first diplomatic efforts in the emerging worldwide jock-geek armistice — have been interconnected since October 1958, when William Higinbotham, a nuclear physicist at Long Island’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, hooked up Tennis for Two, an electronic game of virtual tennis that is widely regarded as the first videogame. The first home videogame console, Magnavox’s Odyssey, included a digital version of table tennis, and then there was Atari’s Pong. The genre quickly expanded to baseball, basketball, football, auto racing, track and field, boxing, soccer, martial arts — if two or more people competed in something in the flesh, pretty soon they could compete in a digital version.
From the beginning, publishers and game designers were locked in an arms race of realism. George Plimpton mocked Atari 2600 owners for their underwhelming baseball game (Home Run) in a 1981 commercial for Mattel’s Intellivision console. (”Here’s an easy question for you,” Plimpton said. “Which of these games is the closest thing to the real thing?”) A couple of years later, a new wrinkle emerged when Electronic Arts signed Julius Erving and Larry Bird to the first-ever licenses to use athletes’ names and images in a sports game, 1983’s One-on-One. Soon there were releases like Tecmo Bowl and R.B.I. Baseball, which featured rosters of professional athletes playing for their real professional sports teams. It was a mind-blowing development for sports fans — and young athletes — who had previously been able to imagine themselves as their favorite players only during backyard pickup games.
Of all these games, John Madden Football — first published by Electronic Arts for the Apple II in 1989 and for the Sega Genesis console in 1990 — was perhaps the most committed to simulating its sport in all its complexity, including, for the first time, 11 players on each side. (”Most of my friends would tell you I started EA as an excuse to make a football game,” company founder Trip Hawkins says. “And there’s probably a fair amount of truth to that.”) Madden and its sequels became the most commercially successful sports videogame ever produced. (That success was cemented in 2004 by an exclusive license with the NFL that eliminated direct competitors.) In 2008, Madden NFL sold more copies than any other title except Wii Play, according to the research firm NPD Group, making EA an estimated $263 million. While John Madden’s career as an excitable TV commentator and analyst made him famous, the Madden videogame franchise — the Gospel of Coach John, available everywhere for $60 — has exerted a larger influence on football, from Pop Warner to the pros.
This is an amazing phenomenon. It offers a contrast to the thought that in all cases video games are evil. What it may suggest is that both the positive and negative aspects of video games can transfer to reality more easily than you may think.
In 2005 I ran a football camp for middle school kids. On one rainy day we hooked up an x-box and in a large meeting room, had the group mimic the formations and strategy played out on the game. The kids loved it and it was a memorable moment for them at the camp.
The run by Stokley is online here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT5gTM2Qf-M&feature=player_embedded
By Jill Laster
Barnes & Noble's college-bookstore division has entered the growing field of textbook rental for college students, the bookseller announced Monday. After testing the waters with a pilot program, the service has expanded. It will allow students to rent textbooks through campus-bookstore Web sites at 25 college campuses or through the Barnes & Noble stores on those campuses. Students can pay for the service in several different ways, including financial aid and campus debit cards. The rental service will compete with other lenders such as Chegg and CourseSmart.
Illustration: Helen Yentus and Jason Booher
When it comes to your social network, bigger is better. Or so we’re told. The more followers and friends you have, the more awesome and important you are. That’s why you see so much oohing and aahing over people with a million Twitter followers. But lately I’ve been thinking about the downside of having a huge online audience. When you go from having a few hundred Twitter followers to ten thousand, something unexpected happens: Social networking starts to break down.
Consider the case of Maureen Evans. A grad student and poet, Evans got into Twitter at the very beginning — back in 2006 — and soon built up almost 100 followers. Like many users, she enjoyed the conversational nature of the medium. A follower would respond to one of her posts, other followers would chime in, and she’d respond back.
Then, in 2007, she began a nifty project: tweeting recipes, each condensed to 140 characters. She soon amassed 3,000 followers, but her online life still felt like a small town: Among the regulars, people knew each other and enjoyed conversing. But as her audience grew and grew, eventually cracking 13,000, the sense of community evaporated. People stopped talking to one another or even talking to her. “It became dead silence,” she marvels.
Why? Because socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote. “They feel they can’t possibly be the person who’s going to make the useful contribution,” Evans says. So the conversation stops. Evans isn’t alone. I’ve heard this story again and again from those who’ve risen into the lower ranks of microfame. At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting.
The lesson? There’s value in obscurity.
After all, the world’s bravest and most important ideas are often forged away from the spotlight — in small, obscure groups of people who are passionately interested in a subject and like arguing about it. They’re willing to experiment with risky or dumb concepts because they’re among intimates. (It was, after all, small groups of marginal weirdos that brought us the computer, democracy, and the novel.)
Technically speaking, online social-networking tools ought to be great at fostering these sorts of clusters. Blogs and Twitter and Facebook are, as Internet guru John Battelle puts it, “conversational media.” But when the conversation gets big enough, it shuts down. Not only do audiences feel estranged, the participants also start self-censoring. People who suddenly find themselves with really huge audiences often start writing more cautiously, like politicians.
When it comes to microfame, the worst place to be is in the middle of the pack. If someone’s got 1.5 million followers on Twitter, they’re one of the rare and straightforwardly famous folks online. Like a digital Oprah, they enjoy a massive audience that might even generate revenue. There’s no pretense of intimacy with their audience, so there’s no conversation to spoil. Meanwhile, if you have a hundred followers, you’re clearly just chatting with pals. It’s the middle ground — when someone amasses, say, tens of thousands of followers — where the social contract of social media becomes murky.
Maybe we should be designing tools that reward obscurity — that encourage us to remain in the shadows. Or what if they warned us when our social circles became unsustainably large? Sure, we’d be connected with fewer people, but we’d be communicating with them, and not just talking at them.
In our search for more and more followers and friends, this article presents an interesting viewpoint. I especially like the illustration.
