Information As Data And As Pictures Can Make Learning Efficient (And Fun)
Earlier today the TED website (Technology, Education, and Design) posted a wonderful talk by David McCandless entitled “The Beauty of Data Visualization,” in which he spends about 18 minutes showing the audience the ease and pleasure with which some pretty arcane, humane, and controversial material can best be learned with a combination of ‘traditional’ data and ‘infographics’ that allow visual comparisons and opportunity for pattern recognition. The presence of the infographic is not new, of course, but Mr. McCandless shows a number of ways similar data sets can show different relationships in a clear and concise manner for the layperson. We have embedded it for your viewing pleasure:
Popularity: 1% | Category Education: Technology, Media Review, Web and Print | | View Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, Ph. D
A Great Survey Of Email-Blast Services For Nonprofits
As our regular readers and Twitter followers are aware, MKCREATIVE has recently and proudly received ‘Gold Status‘ by the Green Business League. We work with our clients to help them green their companies and organizations as well – and a great way to start that process is to use email blasts to get the word out instead of mass paper mailing campaigns. The development of the e-blast/e-zine from its humble days of the turn of the millennium has meant that we have the opportunity to design visually pleasant and reader interactive emails that can inform and entertain. We can do so without burdening either the non-profit trying to get the word out in as effective and efficient manner or the recipient who can read, click-here, scan and delete, or unsubscribe (not from your group’s email list – we’re just sayin’…).
In the last couple of years a number of e-blast services have arisen and many of them have packages geared toward not-for-profits. The good folks at Groundwire.org have written a really helpful white paper about a series of the better known services, what they offer, and for how much. The brief report is definitely worth a look for any group looking to start an email campaign or who want some guidance on how to improve the one they have.
Popularity: 1% | Category Education: Technology, Nonprofit, Software Review, Technology, Web and Print | | View Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, Ph. D
‘Net Neutrality’ Is Complicated – And Is Heading To Extinction (Part II)
I'm shocked - shocked! - that corporations
are closing net neutrality.
The responses to the tag-team proposal/ announcement by Google and Verizon yesterday continue to pour in – few of them favorable. Again we depend on the Huffington Post for providing a useful synopsis of reactions across the media world. We noted Craig Aaron’s reactions on SaveThe Internet.com yesterday, and he has weighed in with a longer response today. Though his analysis of the loopholes Google & Verizon are attempting to open for themselves is worth reading, his countermove is precisely the one we noted yesterday is the one most likely to fail:
If there’s a silver lining in this whole fiasco it’s that, last I checked anyway, it wasn’t up to Google and Verizon to write the rules. That’s why we have Congress and the FCC.
Perhaps for an election cycle or two. But with corporations allowed by the Supreme Court to give unlimited amounts to political campaigns and candidates…?
Today, though, we would like to suggest a couple of ways to think about the issue of net neutrality, or the ways to think about how the net is going to be tiered and controlled over the next few years. Please bear with the mundane analogies…
Popularity: unranked | Category Education: Technology, Marketing, Media Review, National/International, News and Current Affairs, Opinion, Politics, Technology, Web and Print | | View Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, Ph. D
Web Browsers Open Up The Web To Us (And Open Us To The Web)
Ever since the invention of Lynx in the early 1990s to give at least a few folks access to the internet, we have been growing ever more comfortable with accessing information, buying products, and sharing ourselves with our Facebook Friends. We are aware to some degree that the websites we visit place ‘cookies’ on our computers so that the computer and any given website can remember each other and save relevant ‘personal’ information pertinent to the site. But concerns about how intrusive those cookies are have long been voiced since their invention (invented at the same time and by the same man, Lou Montulli, who wrote Lynx and developed Netscape. Moreover, Mr. Montulli expressed fears about the abuse of his cookies.). Recent developments of ‘Third-Party Cookies’ mean that advertisers can track you across sites with their cookies, which can customize your experience throughout the web. They can track your behaviors and steer you toward certain products no matter what you were searching for. Orwellian? The Wall Street Journal believes it could be.
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, Ph. D
Facebook Is Changing Business, Advertising, Language…
Click Me To Follow MKCREATIVE On Facebook
We wind up our week-long survey of Facebook with a look at how it can be used as a business tool, and how people are using it as such. Even if you do not yet have a Facebook site, the impact of the technology on our language is unmistakable: ‘Friend’ has become a verb. The ‘Like’ button has found its way throughout the internet. Posting or tagging someone’s wall no longer has any relevance to spray paint or graffiti… Certainly Facebook has changed the ways companies and nonprofits reach out to their customers and constituents. If your organization has set up an account, or if your organization was convinced to do so by yesterday’s posting, then you will want to see how to disseminate your site and to see how it is being received. Moreover, you want to be ready to take on the changes that social media have ushered in over the last few years, and – more importantly – the changes that are still to come.
Popularity: unranked | Category Community, Education: Technology, Marketing, Media Review, Technology, Web and Print | | View Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, Ph. D
Setting Up Various Facebook Pages – Know The Types!
By the summer of 2009, Facebook came with a few new profiles: personal pages, community pages, and public profiles. The three are distinct, and even within the public profiles, one has a number of choices about the kind of public profile one wishes to establish. There were some issues (surprise!) when the features were first added, but by now many of the kinks have been smoothed out. A little research before you start clicking can go a long way though, because if you start your page in a ‘wrong’ category, all you can do is delete that page and start over, an unpleasant prospect. But please read on and hopefully we can clarify some of the jargon.
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, Ph. D
States Key To Speeding Up Citizens’ On-Line Connectivity
Welcome back from the Independence-Day Weekend. We hope yours was a festive and safe one to celebrate the birth of a new nation striving for ‘a more perfect union.’ Not perfect, but ever striving. This week, we will look at a few of the ways we might be heading toward ‘more perfect union’ and ways we might be letting ourselves down. Today: High-Speed Internet
“The Pew Center on the States” has recently published a report on how states might be the most important lynch-pins to build a ‘national’ high-speed internet network. The report can be found at the website FoundationCenter.org. The report begins by pointing out the problem to be solved, despite the fact that the sheer numbers seems impressive. “Today, broadband is available to about 95 percent of Americans. But that figure masks wide geographic, economic and demographic disparities, and many experts say both the quality and speed of service in the united States need to be improved to keep pace with other nations. and only 65 percent of Americans actually have broadband at home. The remainder— approximately 100 million Americans—say they cannot afford it, do not know how to use it or believe it is irrelevant to their lives, among other factors.” We would suggest that ‘irrelevant to their lives’ is the thorniest of possible issues, as it suggests people believe they need not access information. Imagine, in another context, 45% percent of people in the 1910s not seeing why newspapers might be relevant?
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, Ph. D
Social Media: Introductions and Perseverance Can Bring (Little) Victories
Social media create a counter-intuitive tension. On the one hand, we use social media to create relationships with family, friends, clients, and like-minded peoples of our hobby/political party/aesthetic choices/etc. Relationships take time and are sometimes built on what, at the moment, feels like a rushed introduction or awkward interaction. On the other hand, modern media encourages us to think of news – indeed, of all information – as being reinvented every twenty-four hours. So when I get a ‘Friend’ request or retweet a great article I feel somewhat dislodged from the very information I am trying to disseminate. If one has that sense of disconnect, it might be worth remembering the differences in scale that might exist between one’s social-media persona and one’s self. Then let time work its magic through that scale, even if the social relationships seem few.
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, Ph. D
Five More Ways (of 10) To Make Make Your Blog Work Best For Your Organization
The Social Signal group of Vancouver, CA
As promised, we continue today with the second half of a great compendium drawn up by Jon Cottingham at Socialbright.com. He has been teaching us about how to make a company’s blog a pleasurable experience for the audience (and for the writers!) and how to make such a blog a productive marketing tool. Indeed, to refresh memories from yesterday’s entry, the first point raised was to put the ‘Investment’ in ROI. Today we turn to the back five on our way to the clubhouse and some well-deserved drinks.
6. Firefighting – Crisis communications
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, Ph. D
Five of Ten Ways To Make Your Blog Work For You And Your Organization
Last week the good folks at SocialSignal.com posted a fabulous 10-step program to help nonprofits and small businesses use their blogs to create interest, educate clients, and develop brand loyalty. The downloadable PDF is the culmination of a series of blog entries (of course) by Rob Cottingham and is entitled “10 Ways Your Blog Can Provide Real Value To You, Your Organization, and Your Brand.” The guidance in the e-book is fabulous, and the materials so rich that we wanted to dedicate a couple of entries to it this week. So, without further ado:
“1. Put the I[nvestment] in R[eturn] O[n] I[nvestment] – Showing your organization’s human face”
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, Ph. D
Younger Donors And Social Media Savvy
Sure, we all know that the young seem hard-wired to ‘get’ new technologies (oh, but their time will come!). We know they text as often as talk with their phones. We know they seem impatient if not downright sloppy with their casual conversations. But do we know that the average twenty-something donates about $340 a year to philanthropic causes (Admission: I did not give that much)? That 57%+ twenty-somethings have volunteered on a charity project in the last year? (Disclosure: I can take some comfort for belonging to that statistic)? That 37% of them joined their charity’s social network in the last MONTH (Alright, such social networking was not an option when I was twenty-something)? These statistics are from the Chronicle of Philanthropy‘s summation of recent reports sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, Edge Research and Sea Change Strategies, and by Johnson Grossnickel Associates. Is your organization ready to reach out to them? Are your people ready to be reached BY them?
Popularity: unranked | Category Education: Technology, Nonprofit, Tweets, Web and Print | | View Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, Ph. D
Roundup Of Some Social Media Developments
(Part 2 of 2): The Experts
Yesterday we outlined some success stories of philanthropic and social-action groups who have been able to leverage social media to help with fundraising. As promised, today we look at the backside of some social media developments, and it is not always pretty. The truth of the matter is, many have built up claims to be social-media experts, but most of them are promoters of self, not strategists who can help your organization move through the wealth of opportunity (and desultory time-wasting) made possible by the technology. The self-appointed Expert receives a good deal of roasting in any profession, but the grilling of the social-media guru can be pretty hot. And why not? She/he is being called out by the very producers of content (and the consumers) who he/she claims to be able to help.
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, Ph. D
Folks Like Facebook And Facebook Links the Likes
Back in March we posted access to a wonderful video sendup of the Fox News/Glen Beck phenomenon – a video that can, if you allow it, tap into your Facebook information to have you stand at the center of the conspiracy working to bring Communism to the United States. After the cackles died down (and the secret handshakes of the Illuminati were shared), we at MKCREATIVE wondered about the privacy implications of such a video. One short-term point we made, and one that bears repeating, is that by enjoying the video with our own mugs and friends-as-co-conspirators we are simply drawing from information we have already chosen to make public about ourselves. But the possibility of our semi-private (pseudo-private?) information running away from our control has been further heightened by Facebook’s latest move to have us link our likes around the net – what CEO Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook calls the ‘Social Graph‘: “We’re building toward a web where the default is social. Every application and product will be redesigned from the ground up to use a person’s real identity and friends.” Who will vouch for that ‘real identity’ and what will be bought and sold with the information linked are but two questions worth asking.
Popularity: unranked | Category Education: Technology, Software Review, Technology, Web and Print | | View Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, Ph. D
iPad is Released, And Mobile Computing Grows That Bit More Important
Apple's iPad Launches April 2, 2010
A few weeks ago we posted a two-part preview on Apple’s latest device, the iPad, and (perhaps more importantly) how such a device will move the computing world towards portable devices and ‘cloud computing.’ Well, the day has arrived, and the iPad is on the launching pad. Stores will be presenting it Saturday, so get in line early.
The MKCREATIVE team have not had the honor of receiving a prototype (although we will be testing it at our local Apple store in Towson, Maryland on launch day), and we will make no claims about the device beyond what the reviewers have to say. Our two go-to reviewers are David Pogue at The New York Times, and Walt Mossberg at The Wall Street Journal, but other professional tech reviewers have weighed in with their own experiences. But one reviewer whose more – shall we say “humanist”? – approach might provide a key to how the nonprofit community should embrace this technology.
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, Ph. D
Thirteen Nonprofits Worth Following/Emulating on Twitter (+ 1 More)
The good folks at Socialbrite.org have recently posted a list of what they consider to be a ‘Top-Twelve List’ of social organizations and nonprofits that we all should follow on Twitter. The introduction gives you links to Twitter and how to become a ‘Follower’ of these organizations. It also includes links to individuals who might be worth following as well. It is worth noting that, though the number of ‘Followers’ for each of them is listed, the list is based on the work the groups do and the qualitative use of their Twitter presence, not merely their race to get X numbers on their lists (a quantitative benchmark that seems much more important to celebrities than to community organizations).
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, Ph. D
Education Resources And Analyses In The Context of The Great Recession
Education is a stunningly inefficient human endeavor. A teacher might invest hours of time on a student only to discover that the student’s family situation is too unstable to allow any of the teacher’s influence to stick after the school bell rings. Or the teacher might get dispirited about students’ indifferent reactions to a story, only to discover that a couple of those students recall the story years later and are inspired to write great novels or, better still, become teachers themselves. Or (an irony I have myself experienced) a ‘bad’ teacher might spur a child to believe she could do better if the roles were reversed, so she strives to reverse the roles. Unlike so many other aspects of our economic and social environment, the links of cause-and-effect are tenuous indeed when discussing the ‘value’ or ‘success’ of education.
Nevertheless, we must not give up on the ideal that everyone should have opportunity for a good education to help them strive for what they might choose to strive for. And we must continue to study how better to reform, adjust, and align the educational systems we have. As with environmental and housing issues so important to MKCREATIVE, we are pleased to pass on the word when private and public concerns combine to improve the educational environment of our communities. Today’s example is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation‘s report “PRIMARY SOURCES: America’s Teachers on America’s Schools,” a project done with Scholastic and recently published online.
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, Ph. D