So now let’s set the scene.  It’s sometime during the second half of the semester, and all of your group projects have kicked into gear.  For each class you’re looking through secondary sources, maybe sending out some surveys, maybe putting together a mockup of whatever it is the project is about.  You’re probably starting to write the final report.  You’re definitely putting together some kind of presentation.  It’s also probably a good idea to actually go to all of your classes, not to mention your internship or job, and also try to have some kind of social life (wait, what’s that again?).

This is all generally doable.  Right up until someone says during class “We should probably meet to discuss [insert some part of the project here].”  Because now you’re not just juggling your schedule but also everyone else’s.  If you’re lucky, the professor has cancelled a few classes and you’ve got your meeting time.  But chances are, he or she hasn’t, as that would decrease the amount of time they had to “impart their wisdom upon you” – plus part of the corporate world is working out scheduling conflicts and consulting with colleagues while getting the rest of your work done.  So now you’re all standing around after the lecture as the next class files into the room, smartphones and/or planners out, trying to figure out a meeting time (it’s actually worse if you’re trying to do this over e-mail or text message).

My Management and Organization Analysis professor called the difficulties associated with scheduling coordination costs.  As more people are involved, coordination costs increase.  In other words, it’s harder to schedule a ten person group than a three person group – and trust me, I’ve had to do both.  This could be related to individuals rearranging their schedule, or it could be because of the costs associated with communicating information to group members who couldn’t be there.  If you search Wikipedia for coordination costs, you’ll actually end up at the entry for “transaction costs” instead.  While the entry doesn’t actually define coordination costs (it just links to a blank page instead while using a completely different definition), it started me thinking.  Given the ways that technological developments have changed the way we communicate, what can they do for future classes of students faced with the same tasks I was?

• The most obvious role that technology can play is to make it easier to schedule meetings.  There’s at least one website that can do that – Doodle (I actually really started using this during my last semester).  Doodle lets you create a poll with dates and times, users check off when they can attend, and you end up with a nice chart showing which times work for which people.  Finding a place to meet is considerably harder……but that’s what you get for going to school in the middle of Manhattan.
• Technology can help there too though.  We can video conference instead of sit in the same room, or meet in Second Life instead of real life (never actually tried this), or substitute our physical presence with telepresence.  This doesn’t do much to address scheduling issues, but it can reduce the time and energy costs associated with getting to a physical meeting, not to mention the monetary costs if travel are involved.
• What new media and Internet services can also do is change the way we expect to work together.  I’m thinking specifically of cloud computing here, but there are a lot of potential sources of change.  Collaborative services like Google Apps could allow us to timeshift group work like TiVo did for television.  Students won’t be using their Blackberrys and iPhones to check their calendars when someone proposes meeting – they’ll just jump online instead and use any number of digital collaboration tools.  Maybe they’ll post links to research or work on a draft of their report or annotate a completed presentation.  Maybe they’ll collaboratively create surveys and send them to their social networks.  Or maybe they’ll synthesize trending topics and comments into a market research report for use in their project.

These are just a few ideas I’m throwing out.  I’m sure I’ve read some of these elsewhere, not that I know where right now.  What is perhaps most important out of all of this is that students are going to be able to explore these collaborative technologies and take them beyond the hallowed halls of their academic institutions.  And maybe then they’ll make their way into the hallowed boardrooms of the corporate world.

Of course, none of these tools will keep you from doing most of the work for your group – but that’s another post entirely (you’ll just have to check back for that one).

I created the Explore New Worlds campaign as my final project for the class.  Here’s the description I wrote back in the spring of 2007:

The Explore New Worlds project is an eleven-month advertising campaign designed to encourage the public of the United States to become more active and interested in democracy.  Targeting every American citizen, the campaign begins in December 2007 and ends in November 2008; it rides on the wave of the pre-made spectacle of the 2008 presidential election.  It consists of three parts – a series of print advertisements designed for magazines, billboards, posters, and the web, an alternate reality game (i.e. I Love Bees for Halo 2 or the Lost Experience) centered around a blogger who has discovered a conspiracy to replace democracy with “celebrocracy,” or rule by celebrity, and a series of real world events throughout the nation.

I actually put the website I created for the class back up just for this post – click here if you want to see everything I created for the project I did in class.  Sorry about the cookie cutter-ish appearance; I used iWeb ’05 and I threw it together in one hectic day during finals if memory serves.

This project led two tutorials my junior year with another student and advised by Gallatin Professor Stephen Duncombe (who taught the class on Walter Lippmann), Advertising Democracy I and II.  The goal of the tutorial was to “create a multimedia social marketing campaign designed to revitalize interest in democracy in the United States.”  Lofty, I know.  The first semester we fleshed out our ideas, developing a social marketing plan and expanding the Explore New Worlds campaign into Restart America.  Restart America was definitely an evolution of my previous work, and some elements are the same between both projects – “Have you had your democracy today?” is an example (a tagline I still greatly enjoy and am personally proud of developing).  Restart America also contained new elements too, such as a more in depth plan for the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) that was part of the campaign.

Creating Restart America was an amazing experience; I learned quite a bit during the process.  But we knew that it was a bit impractical – after all, there was  no way that my colleague and I were going to be able to throw together the kind of national advertising campaign outlined in Restart America by ourselves.  So we began to consider how we could scale down into something feasible for the NYU community.  We decided that given NYU’s then-recent efforts to “go green,” we would create a campaign focused on increasing awareness and discussion of sustainability efforts by the University and its students.

This is when we decided to rebrand ourselves as the Ademos Project (Ademos coming from a shortening of “Advertising Democracy”).  We then applied for Youth Venture’s “Be a Changemaker Challenge,”  and were able to secure $1000 of seed funding to proceed with our proof of concept project – the Are You Sustainable? campaign.  We created the Are You Sustainable? website as a place for the various groups focused on environmental sustainability at NYU to come together, but (unfortunately for us) they decided to head in another direction.  Unfortunately, the Ademos Project went no further than Restart America and Are You Sustainable?, but it was a great project to develop regardless, just for the educational experiences alone.

In a future entry I’ll probably write more in depth about the methodology of the Ademos Project, but examining the Explore New Worlds website is a great place to start.  If you have more questions about it, please feel free to comment away!

Anyway, the first step in the colloquium process is to assemble a book list and rationale around the topic (which may or may not be related to the student’s concentration, or area of study).  You can read my rationale and book list at the end of this entry.

Now I had at some point read about 3/4 of the books on my book list, so the next month or so was spent reading the ones I hadn’t and brushing up on older ones.  At the end of my review, I wrote anywhere from a few sentences to one page on all of my books that I decided to bring in with me – a lot better than bringing all 20 of my books with me to my colloquium.

My colloquium took place on April 8, 2009 at 2 p.m. in a little conference room at Gallatin’s home, 715 Broadway.  It was a really interesting experience.  We only got through six or seven of the books (which is expected), but it was a really satisfying conversation nonetheless.  Ultimately I ended up theorizing that a possible role of propaganda in modern democracy could be to overcome flaws in our decision making that arise from psychological heuristics and other behavioral quirks (see Dan Ariely’s TED Talk “Are We In Control Of Our Own Decisions?” for some examples) –  which I didn’t really even mention in my rationale, but studied in a class at Stern called “Decision-Making Strategies in Marketing and Management” (also known as “Judgement and Decision-Making” – here’s an old syllabus).

Overall, my colloquium was quite enjoyable and something which I actually wouldn’t mind repeating.  It would be interesting to one day further explore these topics, especially as more and more research is performed across a variety of fields relating to this topic and other areas of decision-making.

Now if you’re interested, you can read my original rationale and book list:

Public relations means different things to different people but it has one undeniable element: communication. This course is concerned with arranging, handling, and evaluating public relations programs. Students work with actual case histories and deal with contemporary topics such as the use of the computer in public relations.

So what does this mean?  Basically it was a course that taught you how to write a press release.  Now for those of you who haven’t written one before, the press release is unlike other forms of written material.  It’s written in AP style, which is also used by journalists; the logic being that reporters won’t have to rewrite your release for their publication.  It’s a bit tricky to learn, and I’m not sure I could just jump back into writing press releases – in case you haven’t noticed, I’m a fan of using semicolons and multi-part sentences, and press releases require short, clear writing.  But I’d probably be able to muddle through if I had to, I suppose.

Anyway, I do remember two things that my professor (who shall remain nameless) insisted upon.  The first was the fact that there is no such thing as the “first annual” event.  You have the first event and the second annual, but she continually reminded us that there is no such thing as the first annual.  Now the web seems to be on the fence, but I’m kind of okay with this.  But what she stressed even more was the frequent usage of the so called “Harvard comma.”  The Harvard comma, also known as the serial comma, is the comma used before the “or” or “and” in a series.  Example:

The dog, the cat, and the bird

I’m someone who was taught to use the serial comma in grade school, so this aggravated me a little bit.  It took a while for me to get used to not using it when I was writing press releases, but eventually I got the hang of it.  But in the year or so since this class ended, I’ve found myself jumping back and forth – sometimes using it, sometimes not.  It gets kind of frustrating when I’m writing a paper (or a blog post) and in the span of a couple of paragraphs my hands type this supposedly superfluous comma just before the conjunction in a series to not including it at all.  Which isn’t really a big deal I suppose, but it’s just something I happen to notice.  So which one do you use?

What Org Comm does seem to lead to is a bunch of bland looking and sounding presentations, often times featuring the following elements:

• A slide dedicated to the agenda – do you really need to tell me what you’re going to talk about in such great detail?  I’ve seen agenda slides with multiple levels of bullet points.  Not a particularly fun way to begin a talk.
• Slide trackers – Thanks for the fancy diagram at the bottom of every slide telling me what part of the presentation we’re in, but I’d much rather listen to you speak than find out where we are in your story.
• Three levels of bullet points per slide (aka way too much text) – While I respect that you want to put as much information out there as possible, if you put 300 words on a slide (which is just about all of the words in this entry), I’m much more likely to either 1) read your slides instead of listening to you or 2) start checking my Twitter on my phone because I’ve tuned you out entirely (shame on me, I know)

Now I’m not saying I’m perfect – if anything, I’m more likely to throw in an extra transition or two when it isn’t necessary just because I find it cool (what it ends up being is distracting instead).

So what’s the solution?

Well, I don’t have one, but Nancy Duarte does.  In addition to being the Principal and CEO of Duarte Communications, She’s the author of slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, which is a great book that looks at using visual aids to complement a presentation, instead of letting them overrun it (I particularly enjoyed the case studies).  Rather than rehash her book here, I’m just going to recommend that you real her blog (linked to her name) or check out her book (or for that matter any number of the interviews she’s given).  Meanwhile, I think I’m going to get back to designing the slides for my final presentation in one of my classes.

The third tutorial I’ve participated in has taken place during this semester. It’s title is the rather abmbitious “New Politics, New Media, and the Future of Democracy” (then again the first two were the equally ambitious “Advertising Democracy I and II). We’ve been focusing on the role of the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICT) on politics, and over the course of the semester we’ve examined a number of diverse topics including the role of new media during the 2004 Howard Dean presidential campaign and President Obama’s campaign (and his first 100 days in office), network theory, and the role of ICT in civil conflict.  Anyway, the whole point of this post is to discuss the class website, http://newmediatutorial.wordpress.com - it’s the place to go to read some of our work and take a look at what we’ve been working on.  Also, if you go back far enough, you can even see some of videos taken from class discussions at the beginning of the semester.