You know, it’s kind of funny that through my college career, when people often intern everywhere, I basically worked in one place.  Now that I’ve graduated, I’m applying for internships even with a full time job.

But that’s beside the point.  The point is that the application process is to create a Squidoo lens featuring what you’ve done.  So I did.  It’s all about my undergraduate degree, and it’s kind of a chronological walk through my experience at Gallatin.  Check it out (although some of the content was featured here, so it may be a bit of a repeat).

I’ve been working on it for the last few days, and it was an interesting experience.  Any Squidoo lens consists of a series of modules, and you can mix and match modules to create the layout you want.  It’s an interesting system, kind of a mixture of blogging and outside sources of content.  I was able to tie in videos, photos, and Amazon listings into the lens, and it’s that last bit that is particularly interesting.

Squidoo’s revenue is split, 45% to the company, 5% to charity, and 50% to the writer.  And it’s across your lens, so it includes Amazon referrals and Google ad revenue.  I like that they let you donate everything to charity (which is what I’ve done).  I also see the potential for spam – don’t you?

Overall, creating the lens was quite a fascinating and reflective experience, even if I’m not selected for the internship.  I also wonder how many people have joined Squidoo in hopes of landing a position (by the way, Megan commented on the internship announcement saying they’ve already received 50 submissions, so this ought to be interesting), so from that perspective alone I find this interesting.

Do you use Squidoo?  If so, how?  I’m going to start working on another lens soon, but I need some ideas.  Leave a comment and let me know what you think I should write on!

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).

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:

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.