Last night we reviewed the concept of Web 3.0. It’s the end of the quarter so I let some videos do the talking.
Before we watched the videos below I had the students fill out the course evaluation online. This is an interesting feeling. You feel like your future is in their hands as much they feel with it with their grades. I vaguely remember this from when I attended. Strange feeling all around.
After they completed the form, we talked about how I could make the class better. (I’ve been taking notes this quarter and came in with some suggestions of my own.) The following are changes that I’ll make:
- Social media cultural readiness review. I need to cover social media from the perspective of corporate culture and will have students complete a questionnaire to get a feeling for whether their business’ are ready for social media. Going to do this at the end of the quarter since I don’t want people discouraged at the beginning of the course in case the culture they work in is not conducive with Web 2.0 methods. (I’ll also cover how to initiate corporate change.)
- The State of Internet law. Several times, I had students ask about the legality of certain things and we covered the types of licenses under the Creative Commons model. I’m going to have someone from the DU law school come in and speak to the class.
- Blogging about the book they’re reading on the optional reading list. Many of the students wanted to know what others were reading and would like to use blogging to share that information. The book report they’re doing is a one way street and the goal was to find a way to share what they’ve learned.
- Live Twitter feed in class about questions in class. People could submit questions during class so when we completed a section I could answer their questions. Incredible timing for this post!
- More case studies. I used the Twitter Case studies and some of the information in the report by Dr. Phil Hendrix in class. I’ve found that social media is still new enough that it’s hard to find free case studies. (Need a budget increase!) Much of the case study information is contained in the required readings. As more come available, I will utilize them more and maybe use an entire class to focus on one case study.
- Create an actual business utilizing Web 2.0 methods. One of the class projects is to create a Web 2.0 business model and I’d definitely be open to having them actualize their plan. We need better coordination between professors.
- Have the class presentations on Facebook & Twitter coincide with the class that we’re covering that. This is a no-brainer and I didn’t do this in the hopes to give them time to read the book but get to one of the more compelling pieces of social media, namely Twitter, as soon as possible. Also, I honestly didn’t expect the presentations to be as thorough as they were. In the future I’m going to use the presentations as the foundation for the class and fill in any blanks through class discussion.
- Divide the iPhone class into applications and device. Both are important aspects to the iPhone and should be covered separately.
- More guest lecturers. I was planning on having the founders of Brightkite come but we could not get the timing to work. I’d also like to have Dan Burcaw of DoubleEncore come in and talk about the evolving iPhone (and iPad) landscape.
- Have class at Jordan’s pub. While this is not a “bad idea”; I doubt much would get learned; other than to check your liver at the door. Would be memorable though.
Along with these suggestions, we talked about the environment of the class and my goal to make it a social experience. I feel like I pulled it off mainly because of the quality of students in the class. I taught as myself. I didn’t wear a suit. The class was conversational. It was awesome. Again I had tremendous students (jraddatzCO, Alexgold5, Jason_Lauer, chris_blackett, raschmi4, kompostownik) from diverse perspectives and my hope is that we will stay in contact and continue to share our passion for business, social media and the evolving online landscape. (We have, after all, created a niche social network with the class as the social object. We also decided that this class may not work as well with over 10 people and hopefully I’ll get to test that theory out very soon.)
Below are some of the videos we covered in class and we won’t be having our next class. Students need to focus on their final projects with an emphasis on being creative. It’s a huge chunk of their grade and no interpretive dance please. Tuesday will be the first set of presentations; create a Web 2.0 business model and present an up and coming web 2.0 technology. Excited to see what they’ve come up with.
