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Social Tech on Campus in Practice

I was working on some adjustments to next semester’s course schedule, and I had a cool social tech moment that I want to share.

When I am looking at classes to take, I have a couple of places that I will check to see if I want to take the course:

  • PickAProf or RateMyProfessors
  • Friends
  • Google:
    • The instructor’s name just by itself (i.e. “Albert Einstein“)
    • The instructor’s name within UT’s domain (i.e. “Richard Feynman site:utexas.edu “)
    • The course number or name (i.e. “RHE 312“)

Searching for these websites will often get you to an old course website or syllabus from previous semesters. For one of the classes I was looking at (”Computers and Writing”) I ended up coming across the instructor’s website , and from there, I found his Twitter. I tweeted that I was looking at his blog and considering the class and within a minute, he had responded to me!

Having to do some course schedule rearrangements for this fall, stumbled across a class being taught by @johnmjones http://is.gd/OwC -link

@davidgiesberg Thanks for taking a look at the class. Are you thinking about signing up? -link

I think that this is a really cool example of how social tech can facilitate and enhance the way that we do things in the university environment. Having the ability to instantly connect to people in an informal manner can be great for students and the community at large. In this particular case, having Twitter and John’s blog/course website created a great back channel for instructors and students.

Posted 16 July 2008 § UTweet § generation y § social networking § student ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: , ,

The Case for Social Tech on Campus

Why should UT students care about social technologies? I got suckered into volunteered to get involved in UTweet, this post stems from our first discussion about the organization and our goals for it.

The 2007 Torchlight Parade in Austin Texas on the UT campus leading up to the OU vs UT Red River Shootout

Archana and I met this weekend at Austin Java to talk about UTweet and the state of social technologies at the University of Texas. I think that in general, students at UT are fairly clued into technology and social networking - you can’t walk around without seeing people on laptops, using cell phones, or listening to MP3 players. You’ll see people on Myspace or Facebook with totally blinged out profiles (which is cool with me, if that’s what trips your trigger - just don’t slap me with a large trout or whatever). Both of those sites are, in my opinion, fantastic for maintaining person-to-person connections, but are not very good for facilitating dialogues in an easy way or enhancing true communications with one another.

I believe that we (UTweet) can help show the UT community the strength of new and emerging social technologies as tools for helping us do the stuff we do every day more effectively. Social and general web technologies and services can help us connect with each other, as individuals, teammates, peers, organizations, and the community as a whole.

We polled community members and alumni via Twitter on why students should care about social technologies like Twitter, here are some of the responses:

Hayes Davis hayesdavis @davidgiesberg i agree. i get value from twitter in the form of real-world connections. facebook, et al aren’t meeting their potential. 05:23 PM June 29, 2008 from web in reply to davidgiesberg
Connie Reece conniereece @davidgiesberg Students should care because these are now business tools and they need to learn how businesses use them. (my short answer :) 03:38 PM June 29, 2008 from web in reply to davidgiesberg

I think Hayes and Connie hit it on the head - this stuff has moved from being a way to connect to people you already know and maintain those connections to a way for us to conduct business and make more worthwhile connections with people that we might not otherwise have a chance to. Twitter is a fantastic example of a tool with a low barrier to entry for staying connected with people on a day-to-day basis and connect with people in a way that we could not before.

The way I see it, we can help show UT how to use these cool technologies and make the UT community just a little bit tighter and a little bit better connected.

Hook ‘em Horns!

Picture courtesy of flickr user mr3wan.

Posted 02 July 2008 § UTweet ‡ Comments (4) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Innovation Camp Austin 2008

Wow! I spent yesterday at the very first Innovation Camp, which was held here in Austin. It was a great gathering of people that “want to learn about innovation by doing it rather than listening.” I got to meet a number of techies, entrepreneurs, startup folks from Austin and the surrounding communities. The best way to describe the sort of people who were there would be to say that they are the folks that want to take their businesses, projects, or communities in unconventional directions - forward-looking thinkers.The guys from ACTLab talk about their program

It was an ad-hoc style conference (based off of the BarCamp concept) where there were no set-in stone panels speaking at the attendees; instead, there were sessions set up with loose topics and voted on by the attendees with free discussion and debate. It was a very egalitarian setting in which everyone was encouraged to participate and argue debate about a very wide range of topics with the common thread of changing the way things are done in our community.The co-company discussion with the guys from Conjunctured

Here are a couple of the discussions that I participated in along with a few of my thoughts (stay tuned this week as I go into more depth on some of these discussions):

  • Co-working in Bryan/College Station, TX
    The guys from The Creative Space were there to discuss their experiences as the first co-working space in Texas - very interesting discussion about the different issues and approaches that a group encounters going from an informal group of independents working together to a group with common business interests and a shared space. Here is an interview with Cody Marx Bailey, one of the founders of The Creative Space.
  • The University of Texas ACTLab
    The ACTLab is a group folks at UT doing a whole lot of creative and innovative projects centered around doing, not standard educational regurgitation. Their enthusiasm was infectious and inspiring to everyone there - they are building the sorts of free-thinkers that we can always use more of in the world…
  • Austin as an Emerald City
    Everyone has different ideas about why Austin kicks ass, we wanted to find a shared vision for what we can do as Austinites going into the future
  • Co-company Case Study
    The guys from Conjunctured had a great discussion about how they are developing the co-company concept - taking a group of independent creative workers and allowing them to maintain a great deal of autonomy while still having the resources of a larger brand to depend on
  • The Austin Startup District
    Dane led a discussion about his and John Erik Metcalf’s vision for building a cohesive environment and community for independent entrepreneurs and startups here in Austin. It was a very thought-provoking view of how enterprising millienials in Austin want to change how the startup game is played as we enter and take the the reigns in the community and business worlds
Posted 29 June 2008 § blog ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , , , ,