Augmented Reality in Education

Fred, a friend of mine shared the following video with me.  It highlights the potential for AR in educational settings.  As Fred said, "This technology is only 2-3 years old. Where will it be in 10 years?!"

What uses for AR do you see in education?

Where's All This Technology Taking Us?

Or more importantly where are we taking this technology? Like a Daft Punk song or the Six Million Dollar Man, the technology is getting better, faster, stronger. But what are we doing with it?  Is the technology driving us, or are we using it to enable better experiences?

A few years ago, I wrote about the end of the monitor and mouse era.  We are now starting to see tablets utilized by entire districts.  I see in the near future a combination of BYOD (bring your own device) and subsidies to make sure every student has district approved and imaged mobile devices.

With any endeavor that utilizes technology, we need to make sure we understand our goals and how tools can help us.

How are you using technology to improve your constituents' experiences?

Digital Reputation Management Event

Tonight was another great educational event put on by the fine folks at MIMA. One of the things I'll miss about moving out of the Twin Cities will be access to these events. The topic of the evening was Digital Reputation Management. The discussion reminds me that the principles and theories of good communication and constituent relations haven't changed because of the internet or Web 2.0, as much as they have been accelerated. Great conversation with Ward about this topic as well. Anyway, if you're not doing so already here are three tools you can use immediately to try and "listen" to what people are saying about your business:

1. Spy - http://spy.appspot.com/
2. Google Alerts - http://www.google.com/alerts
3. Twitter Search - http://search.twitter.com/

Other advice from the panel included embracing transparency, being honest and human...and not creepy. That's pretty good advice regardless of setting.

MIMA Blogger discusses the Obama Approach to interactive marketing

Interesting post from the folks at MIMA:

Obama’s seamless integration of so many interactive tools makes his approach look simple and easy. For the most part, it is. Consensus among writers from Fortune Magazine, CNN.com, Fast Company and more is that what made it work was Obama’s clear sense of knowing what his key messages and strategy would be from the beginning.

In an election-night interview with “60 Minutes,” Obama’s staff said that they knew from day one what their messages and strategy would be. They stuck to it and never wavered.

As my EVC counterparts have long said -- no random acts of marketing. Make sure your tactics are tied to your strategy and desired outcomes.

Happy Birthday iTunes

Happy Birthday iTunes!!

Think about how iTunes is helping shape and change the way we consume media...all in the past five years. Think about the way television programing and the music industry have changed (for better or worse) in the wake of iTunes. It is pretty impressive the magnitude of change that we've seen in the past five years. Personally, I use iTunes for my music, numerous podcasts, buying TV shows, and I even use it to watch movies rented from the iTunes store. My iMac at home, and my iPod and iPhone, continue to give me more freedom when it comes to choosing which media I'm going to consume and when I chose to consume it. As I write this, I'm watching an episode of "Frisky Dingo."

Thanks Apple.

What's Your Connection Strategy?

Beyond brand and symbolic identity, you need to understand the technology that will be used to deliver your message and enable engagement with your stakeholders. The technology you choose creates structures that both enable and constrict future communication. Five years ago, we didn't think about gesture technology or a robust web browser on our phone. Five years from now, what will we have available? User experience and design elements will be challenged as we continue to move away from the standard keyboard, monitor, mouse framework.

TED - Ideas Worth Spreading

I was recently turned onto TED by a coworker. TED stands for technology, entertainment, design. There's a lot of good, in depth content. In this nerd's opinion, Wow! What a great site. As a sampling, here's a video of Larry Lessig (Stanford prof and digital copyright authority). "TEDTalks" are also available via podcasts.

Compact Disc (1982 – 2007)

R.I.P. Compact Disc. From today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Once praised for its clear, crisp audio quality but panned for its susceptibility to scratches and smudges, the compact disc passed away in 2007 after a quick but painful illness. It was 25 years old.

You can read the entire obit here.

I’m guessing that the AP has the obit for appointment television already prepared.

(Thanks to Bret for the article.)

How much would you pay for Radiohead’s new album?

Radiohead’s new album will be available for download. The announcement for the much anticipated album comes less than two weeks prior to its release. In what seems to be a twist on Wilco’s recent run of making singles and albums available digitally, via their site, before the physical release of the album. Here’s the Radiohead twist, you set the price! Yes, you set the price. You pay an additional .45 Pounds for the download cost – beyond that you set the price.

Here’s another example of the Web changing traditional commerce models and a great example of strengthening one’s brand. I hypothesizing, but believe that most (or enough to make if viable) Radiohead fans will pay a reasonable rate to make it worth it to the band (who is releasing this without a major label). And what if they only cover the costs of the download? Who cares?! The real money for bands is through touring. They don’t tour to support an album, they release and album to support a tour. Also, this novel way of approaching an album release and pricing will generate enough buzz to continue to expand and sell the Radiohead catalog. Even the old label wins here.

A few takeaways: (1) Leverage new media in meaningful ways, just don’t repeat the constrained old media in a new channel, you'll just screw up faster. (2) Remain authentic (see #1). (3) Continue to engage and leverage your base community and allow room

Thanks to Kyle for the article.

Culture Jamming

Culture Jamming & The Importance of Owning Your Identity

Through acts of cultural jamming we can see how one’s symbolic identity (and its acceptance by the public) are at risk if it is not authentic and grounded. Culture Jamming, according to Wikipedia, “is an act that transforms existing mass media to produce commentary about itself, using the original medium’s communication method.” I see it as guerilla marketing that usurps the dominant or intended message with an alternate message – which may be more succinctly described as negative-chaining. Cultural jamming disrupts the one-way channel of advertising. Sometimes this may be cute and clever without much damage, eliciting a laugh or a chuckle from an audience member. On the other hand it can be much more damaging actually devalue the symbolic currency of one’s identity through negative-chaining.

Culture jamming is another example of the new media age changing the game – not just the media channels and the speed at which those channels can deliver messages, but the ease of others to possess the tools and skills to hijack a message. This reinforces the need for your identity to be authentic and grounded. You need to walk the talk. If not your message is more susceptible to falling prey to cultural jammers. Mind you, the cultural jammers aren’t simple graffiti artists or vandals – while some may argue they are. They are cleverly coopting media and transferring ownership of the message. They are not doing it as a simple mark of physical territory like a gang member might do. And, they aren’t the Allen Funts or Ashton Kutchers of the world –they don’t want to take advantage of individuals. Instead, their targets are corporations and media channels. It is the corporation that is on Candid Camera and it is the less than diligent media that is Punk’d. Check out Joey Skaggs rules on who’s fair game to better understand this point.

While doing more research on Ji Lee’s Bubble Project, I came upon more interesting pranks and cultural jamming examples… flash mobs, Joey Skaggs, billboard liberation front etc (last year I had a post about flash mobs fizzling when advertisers tried to coopt them). You can see the absent-minded media running with a story like it’s a ham sandwich – wait ham sandwiches don’t run, but this story had legs.

In my opinion, a great example of cultural jamming comes form the Yes Men and their Dow Ethics incident - see the Bhopal and HUD sections of fake news created a real event. News outlets thought the Yes Men were Dow representatives and that Dow was going to make reparations for it’s chemical disaster in Bhopal. This in turn caused the real Dow spokes people to restate their rather unsavory position regarding the Bhopal disaster refreshed collective image of the tragedy and reminded the public image of a cold corporation.

There is an artistic/creative/novel element at play here. With all forms of communication and entertainment, artistry is needed to engage the audience. Sometimes the culture jamming artistry breathes new life into seemingly dormant dramas or it creates negative-chaining, as the seeds for a symbolic vision’s destruction are sown in it’s genesis. Once a particular story violates the here-and-now or is seen to be inauthentic, a vision is on the express path to implosion.

As I mentioned earlier, there is a guerilla nature to this kind of media expression. I see it as a flip to when advertisers try to grab onto a new media or segment only to have it backfire because the audience knows it is not authentic. Some recent examples are flogs (fake blogs) or the corporate sponsored flash mobs that failed to ignite interest. Successful culture jammers are able to disrupt the flow of information (in the least) and if done correctly can make once propagandic, one-way message awake our critical thinking and re-evaluate a product or service.

The risk for being a victim of jamming, much like the risk of running failed guerilla marketing campaigns, increases in relation to your inauthenticity and inability to ground your identity.
Now those that worship at the shrine of advertising will still argue that any buzz is good buzz. I think that ‘s only true in the gossip/tabloid/celebrity hype machine. It surely isn’t the case in politics, products, or services. Ask the Dow PR team about the buzz generated by the Yes Men.

The speed of today’s media reinforces the need to have an authentic, grounded identity.

Wait, Macs get sick too!

Apple broke one of their brand promises with me this week. Everything doesn’t always work with a Mac. In this case, a hard drive failure on my iMac. Thankfully, this happened within the first year of the warranty, so the replacement will be free. Data recovery, well that’s another story.

After multiple calls to Apple support and hours of verifying, reparing, and repeating, my hard drive finally gave up. I was living a definition of insanity, trapped in the closed-loop system of Apple Tech Support. Apple level-one phone techs refused to believe that it could be a hardware issue – telling me that we want to try this again, just one more time. After the fourth attempt at verifying, it was clear the hard drive wasn’t getting better, nor was the tech support. One stop at our trusted, local, Apple authorized, service center and it’s clear it’s a hardware issue.

Then, this week in the midst of the problems, I see the cart of sick PCs on a recent “Get a Mac” add. It was like a punch to the gut.

Hopefully, after the new hard drive and some other upgrades and restores, everything will just work on my Mac.