For about three years I worked as a program assistant at a large historical institution on an iPod application called Play the Past. The object of the app is to help school age students on field trips, part of the “Digital Native” generation, connect the content they learn in the exhibits at the museum to resources back in the classroom. I started on this project when I was an intern in college, and for the next few years after I was hired full-time, my work life revolved around the new field of gamification.  I have to admit, when I started this project, I was worried that using technology would take away the pure immersive experience of visiting a museum. It’s probably no surprise that I was the kind of kid who would hold the field trip group up because I was reading every single panel, so my level of engagement was quite high. The reality is that there are so many different ways of taking in information, and it was interesting to see how our app could help students who may otherwise be uninterested or unengaged. Working on this project was a marathon rather than a sprint, and because it is such a new field, at times it felt like I was taking a masters class. Because we didn’t have a model to work from, we had to depend on feedback loops from testing. This experience shaped my early career, and I learned a lot about the power of immersion in education and using social media as a classroom connector.  Here’s just a few of the highlights I learned observing student interaction with our game.

1. Give students the power to personalize. This may seem obvious, but by giving kids the option to take a profile picture at the beginning of the game gave them ownership over their experience, resulting in a higher level of engagement.

2. Include a variety of tasks tailored to different learning styles within the app.  For example, some kids were obsessed with the mining exhibit portion that focused on hand-eye coordination, while others enjoyed the information collecting at the fur trade area.

3. Don’t over think it.   It was tempting to make the experience more complex to stretch the limits of what the platform could do, but we realized that we should really be harnessing the power of the kids’ innate imaginations.  They already jumped into the roles of the physical exhibit, such as miners or prairie farmers, we just needed to keep our activities simple and to the point.

4. Actually listen to the students.  This is a no-brainer, but it’s amazing how fast you can get sucked into the rabbit-hole of “what if we put this widget into the game??” If you spend a lot of time and energy on a feature that you think kids will love, but in testing it falls flat, it can be really hard to let go of an idea you’ve become attached to.  I think this was one of the biggest lessons I learned from this position.  Fight for a good idea, but know when it’s time to let go and move on.  With this mindset, it becomes more and more easy to create a product that will actually be successful, rather than one you think/want to be successful.

The title of this post comes from the Polpeo’s crisis management drill on the “Social media in the news” discussion forum, I decided to explore this topic further.  While Public Relations as the concept of controlling a public image has been around as long as politicians have, the official industry of Public Relations has really only been around for a hundred years or so. One of the elements that I’m sure has risen the blood pressure of every PR director since its inception is social media. While in the past, companies have had days to strategize a response to a publicity crisis, according to Poleo’s site, companies now have less than an hour of a timeframe to form an appropriate response.

Social media is a double edged sword for both private and non-profit organizations.  On one hand, it’s a fantastic way to get your message into the world.  On the darker side, you have no control over the reactions your message will receive, and what’s more, an embarrassing gaffe can turn into a viral nightmare.

I can’t imagine how stressful it must be to work for someone who is constantly putting the reputation of the company at risk through innappropriate social media use.  I’d guess that someone who is working in the PR department or has this person as a client must always be waiting for the other shoe to drop.  On the other hand, companies must be particularly careful in who they let at the helm, take for example, the Digiorno’s frozen pizza mishap, where the employee responsible for tweeting clearly did not do enough research on the trending domestic abuse awareness hashtag #WhyIStayed.  Digiorno’s cringe-inducing answer to this hashtag?  “Because you had pizza.” Oh my god. Or the face-palm reaction I had to the Spaghetti-o’s Pearl Harbor  tweet.

I learned a lesson in social media hiccups the hard way when I had my own fixable, but embarrassing, social media mix-up before. While I was working in the Marketing department of a history museum I was asked to post about one of the toys in an upcoming exhibit, and when I googled the toy, I misunderstood who had manufactured it.  This was communicated to me by five different viewers in about five minutes.  Point taken. I never posted anything again until I was 110% sure I had my facts correct.

In theory, collaboration is the ideal state for a group working towards a goal.  Collaboration is great, It seems like it should be easy, especially in an era when communication is easy, instantaneous, and gives a seemingly endless variety of tools for humans to work together across geographical divides.

Within the last fifteen years the concept of “the office” has changed dramatically due to the internet and social media tools that allow us to work with people in offices across the country, reach our customers and library patrons, and as was pointed out in our class’s discussion thread last week, work together to transcribe the menus of New York.  I think collaboration is something great to be strived for, but it seems like too often, organizations and teams can run into roadblocks that can derail even the best intentions of teamwork.  I’d like to explore some of the reasons collaboration can be a challenge, even in the ideal circumstances.

A major factor in the success of collaboration is trust.  While telecommuting and working with teams who are not in the same physical space on projects that are based online through social media platforms are efficient in that participants can work any time of the day, any place in the world.  But as Nilofer Merchant argues in the Harvard Review, collaboration can be a dangerous thing when expectations of roles, outcomes, and recognition are unclear.  To expand on this point, in Sally Ellis’ article “A History of Collaboration, a Future in Crowdsourcing: Positive Impacts of Cooperation on British Librarianship,” she quotes Nina Simon, a museum design consultant, on why collaboration can break down in the case of institutions turning to crowdsourcing, “Many museums fear losing control… [but] [t]here’s a difference between having power and having expertise… [m]useums will always have the expertise, but they may have to be willing to share the power.”  It seems to me that without trust, collaboration is not possible.  Trust that people will do what they say they will at the time they say they will.   Trust that collaborators will supply the correct information and that they have the best interests of the project at heart, and trust that everyone is working towards the same goal.  Without these elements, any project could have the misfortune of falling apart.  But, in a perfect storm of contributors staying on the same page towards a common reward, collaboration can be a ideal workspace to create something pretty great.

A few weeks ago, there was a class discussion thread about the journalist Lindy West’s confrontation with one of her trolls.  I was glad to see this discussion and while I added some thoughts to the thread, I’ve realized after a few weeks this story has really stuck with me, so I’m going to delve a little deeper.

There will always be bullies.  There will always be trolls.  The common thing you hear as a child when someone is mean to you is that “Well, that person feels bad about themselves so they want everyone else to be miserable.”  Judging from so many of the internet comments I’ve seen, boy, there’s a lot of miserable people out there.  And that’s too bad.  But when they feel they have the right to take it out personally on other people from the safety of their anonymity is where I take issue.  As I said in the discussion thread, the part of Lindy’s conversion with her troll that made me stop what I was doing out of shock was his self-aware admittance of his reason for his hateful abuse “I think my anger towards you stems from your happiness with your own being. It offended me because it served to highlight my unhappiness with my own self.”  WHAT.  How can someone that self-aware create so much hate?  Because he’s human, and humans will sometimes make horrible choices when they’re unhappy.  So while trolling is something that could depress and anger me, I’d rather look at the ways that harassment victims can collaborate to bring light to the abuse that is taking place  by creating an online culture where there is a social recourse to sending violent threats to

While I think it’s great that there are laws starting to take place to address online harassment and bullying, it will be a while before there is a clear course of action for those who are harassed online.  It makes me wonder how social media users can collaborate to create safer spaces for discussion, especially spaces that have been resistant in the past to outside voices. without worrying about receiving abusive threats?  In the real world, the majority of people do not go around threatening or insulting anyone they disagree with because of social mores and possible damage to reputation.  Online of course, there are much fewer barriers to hate speech and bullying, so those who cannot say how they really feel on a daily basis

To be clear, I am in no way advocating that we should stoop to the same level of trolls who will “dox” someone by releasing such personal information such as addresses and social security numbers.  I do believe though, that the risk of having one’s name connected to their hate speech could be a powerful deterrent to sending out abusive messages if one faces the risk of being outed as a hatemonger.

For example, some women who have received rape and death threats on Twitter will retweet them to let their online communities be aware of what they are experiencing or to alert law enforcement of the threats they have received.  Or in the case of Alanah Pearce who, when she found out the identities of her harassers were teenage boys, she contacted their mothers to let them know what their sons were up to.  So many women have experienced this, and by speaking up about the hate mail they are receiving, it sheds light on what is going on.  With increased awareness, such as journalists writing about these women’s experiences and online communities who will collaborate to support the victims of these threats by creating a culture where this kind of behavior will not be tolerated.

I know that with secured anonymity on the internet,  trolls will not be gone any time soon, and the common adage is “Don’t feed the trolls!” .  But until there is an online culture where everyone feels safe to participate, the tide of trolls may possibly be deterred using collaboration and self-policing of online communities to deter those who want to make others feel unsafe from participating in online cultures.

Hi There,

My name is Roxanne Kalenborn and as you can see from my blog title, I am an MLIS student who lives in Vancouver.  I just moved here last August from Minnesota and right now there’s nothing I am enjoying more than this rainy Vancouver winter, because compared to what I’m used to, this is downright tropical.

I’m really looking forward to taking this class and taking my social media skills to the next professional level.  My previous experience has been both personal and professional.  Personally, I have an account with all the usual suspects…Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, and Pinterest.  I use these sites as a digital photographic record of my life, but I tend to shy away from sharing anything too personal or emotional as I know that basically anything I post has a possibility of staying online forever, so you probably will not see posts from me airing any sort of dirty laundry.  Even though I am emotionally gun-shy on my own social media, I do find the subject of online sharing of personal lives fascinating, especially where people draw the line on what is appropriate to share with the world, and how our concept of privacy is changing.  In my academic background, I kept a blog while I studied abroad in Dublin during my last semester of college as a way to keep my friends and family updated back home, and my school used my posts as well on their study abroad site.  I’m really glad I worked on that project as it was a great way to document my experience and enhance it with photos that I may not have done on my own using a travel journal.

In my professional background, I have been the creator/maintainer of a few social media sites while at my previous job at the Minnesota Historical Society.  The project I had the most responsibility for was the project “Tweeting the Civil War” where I used letters and diaries of Minnesotans who had experienced the Civil War and condensed them into tweets to correspond to the current date 150 years later.  Although I have since passed the project on, it felt really good to get positive feedback from teachers using the site as an educational tool.  While I worked in the marketing department of the Historical Society, I worked on the institution’s Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest feeds, and I really enjoyed it, although I found it to be quite stressful whenever I made any sort of slight factual error, because I could be sure that over a dozen strangers would be sure to call us out right away.  So while I enjoy working on social media, I always feel like the stakes are higher because there is the feeling that you are being fact-checked down to the comma placement sometimes.  I’m hoping by taking this class I can gain more of the theory of social media marketing and build my confidence in sharing online.