Virginia Tech Tragedy: Web 2.0 to the Rescue!

GO HOKIES! I am a proud graduate of Virginia Tech. The education I recieved there prepared me for a wonderfully exciting career at the nexus of technology and business. The friends I met there are the ones that I have held closest to my heart over the last 20 years. In fact, my roomates from sophmore year and I had already planned to meet up in Blacksburg this year for the Miami game. That encounter will no doubt take on quite a different tone given the recent news.

Most importanly, the friend I hold closest to my heart, my wife, is a fellow Hokie. We met during her sophmore year. For me, it was without-doubt a case of love at first sight. Seven years later (it took me a while to convince her about the love-at-first sight thing ; ), Theresa and I were married at the Virginia Tech chapel. The date was April 15, 1995.

Yes, in case you are wondering, this is the same chapel where you most likely saw bodies being laid out on TV the other night. In fact, my uncle called me from England because he did not put two and two together until he saw the news footage of the Chapel and called to make sure that all was well with us. He had attended our wedding 12 years ago and the light went off in his mind when he saw the images on TV.

To Theresa and I, Virginia Tech is more than simply a place on some map. It is a huge part of who we are as people. When Virginia Tech takes a hit so do we. Theresa was lucky enough to have Nikki Giovanni for English her Freshman year in college. Dr. Giovanni’s address to the Hokie faithful is nothing short of astounding. The response to her address is simply 100% Hokie Nation. Those of us from Tech will take much solace in this video.

When I first watched this short address I found myself simultaneously steeped in the emotions of deep sorrow and incredible pride. A truly eerie feeling. I was tearful because that part of me that is Virginia Tech is battered, bruised and still laying on the ground not quite sure if it wants to get up. At the same time, I am proud that there are role models like Dr. Giovanni, a passionate and powerful scholar with a gift for words. Her passion and talent as a professor makes me want to become a better guide to all the kids I have the honor teaching at NCSU. I was most proud though, to feel kinship with my fellow Hokies who responded to Dr. Giovanni’s incredible address in typical fashion…With a “Lets go Hokies” chant!

I remain saddened to know that my alma matter will always be remembered for something that could have happened anywhere, anytime, anyplace. It just happened to be Blacksburg, on the 16th of April (one day after our 12th wedding anniversay) in Norris Hall and West AJ.

Virginia Tech is so much more to so many of us than what happened there at a particular time-stamp in the relentless unfolding of time. But unfortunately, since the invention of the printing press, and the recording of opinion guised as fact, and the search of the sound byte rather than the desire to share compassion, April 16th is the one day that will continue define our incredible alma matter many years to come.

Those of us who opt to live in the land of the soundbite errantly assume that we can Grok everything from the news. Well today is a new day. The big news today is that the students up at Tech are no longer talking to reporters. Instead, they are keeping their mouths shut and handing out flyers politely asking them to go home. GO HOKIES!

In typical Hokie fashion, these wonderful, creative, resilient kids are leveraging technology like never before. They are setting up Facebook vigils. What is that you ask? Well these kids are Digital Natives. Most of the victims had a Facebook or Myspace account.

For those of you who are Digital Immigrants who dont have teenagers, this means that there is a digial place in cyberspace that these students created as the silicon-based equivalent of their carbon-based self. It is a place that the typical user goes to at least 30 times a day. It is a place where owners work to continue to personalize and hone the place to be in tune with who they really are (and sometimes who they aspire to be). In short it is their digital persona.

So, now that physical peson is gone, those who knew the victims and were connected to them via digital friend profiles are using the power of social networking to invite others to the victim’s page to hold vigil. Hundreds of thousands of students from around the world are gathering around the victim’s pages to grieve, yell, question, talk, listen, and support their fellow students. Web 2.0 has become a coping mechanism for the ills of the world. Everyone particpates, no-one delegates and it makes us feel better.

In a Web 2.0 world like this who needs journalists who just want to reduce the enormity of what happened to a shocking soundbite by using the word “Massacre” everywhere you turn?

Where is the compassion in the reporting? Why are we moving beyond being here now with these wonderful Hokies whose lives have been ripped apart, whose souls have been bared to the darkest side of humanity and whose cognitions are reeling like reeds in a hurricane of inquiry to talk about who is to blame or gun control, but never to listen, support and share in grief. Seems like Journalists need to get back to basics. Kubler-Ross anyone?

Instead the question coming from all sides is Who is to blame? My response to that is… Who the hell cares? Does finding someone to blame make this tragedy (note that I did not use the word Massacre) go away? Of course not. So, I’ll say it again. Who the hell cares where blame lies? The truth is that the past is past and gone forever. The future is uncertain and can’t be known. The present is called the present because it IS a PRESENT. A gift where humainty can dwell in synchrony to make things better for themselves and for each other. Thankfully, today’s generation seems to be more aware of this than my own and they are leveraging Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate that collaborative healing process.

So, for all of our sakes, lets all just be there now (except the journalists that is) and lets be whatever it is the Hokie Nation needs us to be to allow them to begin that increasingly important human ability to forgive and foget.

I have steered clear of mainstream media throughout the past week. If you want to experience the truth about what happened in Blacksburg the other day go to where the people who are self organizing via the use of Web 2.0 tools. There you get the raw but honest sense of what these folks are going thorugh. You also start to see just how important and neccessary Social Networking is becoming in a world that is fueled by the relentless and accelerating flow of information/media from every angle.

Thank the universe for Web 2.0. I can YouTube Dr. Giovanni and replay her address over and over again. I can experience what it felt to be there chanting “Lets Go Hokies” out loud with my wife while we are here in bed in Raleigh NC. As a digital immigrant trying desperately hard to swim up the Web 2.0 stream, I can also share in paying homage and respect to the digital personas of the wonderful students whose lives were so horribly interrupted before coming to full bloom. In doing so, Web 2.0 helps to shrink my world and makes it really personal. Long live Web 2.0.

One final note. Social networking works in the carbon-based world too. Last night we went to a Flaming Lips show with some friends. We were not in the mood but forced ourselves to go. Thank God we did. The show itself was amazing and provided a neccessary respite from the back room boys in my brain processing all this stuff. Even more amazing though, was the amount of maroon and orange at the show. I also noticed that the confetti used throughout the show was burnt orange. Coincidence perhaps…methinks not.

BTW tomorrow (Friday, April 20) is Maroon and Orange day. So, please dig into your closet and join the Hokie Nation in showing your support for the people in Blacksburg and their extended families that reach around the globe many times over.

Anyway, I ran into a guy at the bar who had a Hokie hat on. I asked him if he was a Hokie. He said no but that his wife was. He said she was too upset to attend the show, but he thought it would be a good thing to wear the hat to show his support.

It was a good thing he wore his hat. We should all wear our hats. We should all go to Facebook. We should all wear Maroon and Orange tomorrow. And finally, we should all start to leverage 2.0 techology to do what it does best: Facilitate human interaction on a scale that was previously unimaginable. If we did there may be less of the kind of crap we tend to be seing on the news every night and more of the kind of humanity and humilty we are capable of would come shining through.

Long live Web 2.0 and Long Live the HOKIES. Become part of the solution. Web 2.0 is READ-WRITE web. Focus on the latter (that means WRITE!). Get a blog, get into the conversation. There are no excuses. If an old fart like me can do it, believe me anyone can!

Plus, it makes you FEEL a whole lot better.

GO HOKIES

Enrichment of Experience….Must See TV errr Web Video

I found out today that I get to chat with a Business Week reporter on Monday about 3Di.

Being a Web 2.0 kinda dude – and since I cant sleep anyway – I decided to see what I could find out about Aili McConnon before we got to talk next week. I do this all the time. The web is such a cool way to find a hook/meme or something in common between parties that quickly allows the synchronous connection to move to co-creation of insight.

My last post was about the power of Web 2.0. When I read the work (and watched the interviews) from Aili and her colleagues, I immediately sent it to two of my pals whom I knew would be very interested in their work.

Moreover, I now know so much more about where Aili is coming from our conversation will be all the richer. In this new world of information overload and attention defecit, Informaiton is the currency, people are the transport mechanism, conversation is the transfer mechanism and insight is the value exchange. As John Seely Brown so eloquently put it, Information does indeed have a social life and Web 2.0 just makes it happen faster. As Larry Prusak would say Knowledge Management is an oxymoron because you should not focus on managing “stocks” of information but instead we should be doing all we can enable its “flow” thereby creating knowlege accidents that generate value.

Also, because I think the research that Aili and her colleagues have done is so cool, I am so excited about the fact that we get to talk next week. This goes back to my notion that hardcore Web 2.0 people essentially become hardcore lifelong learners by default. The only adjustment here, for clarity, is that life-long learning is also every-moment learning in the Web 2.0 world.

Imagine a frictionless and distance-free environment powered by Web 2.0/Semantic Web/3Di that enables folks who are passionate about what they do to automagically connect with with people who have a need (i.e. willing to pay for) for exactly what those people are passionate about. This is the ultimate virtuous cycle. Could we really be on the cusp of something this big? Service Orient Architectures componentize social web services enable Mash Ups that make this value connection on an ongoing basis based on: where people are, what they are doing and the profile of who they are and what they like driving what is rendered up in that very same space.

Who knows? When I read SnowCrash 10 years ago after Dorothy Leonard Barton decreed at a PDMA conference that this is a book you must read… I said to myself “That is such a cool notion….too bad I’ll be dead when the Metaverse becomes a reality.”

Boy was I off-base on the time scale here. I did survive a 100-mile an hour head on collision in my early twenties…but barring that here I am at 40 spending more and more time in the Metaverse, and hopefully I have at least half my life still ahead of me. I won’t go back into Ruben Steiger’s funny story about his chat with Neal about Second Life being the Metaverse….but I will say that the arrival of the Metaverse within my own lifetime is a very welcome surprise.

Anyway, I digress (a byproduct of ADD).

Aili and her colleagues have a truly fascinating study that correlates with my own hypothesis that Avatar-Mediated Interaction enables an Enrichment of Experience. The creation of an experience that is not only near-real life or even augmented-virtual-reality but…plain-and-simply an experience that is different and than one you could ever experience in real life and by going through it you learn more about you own self and those around you.

All I can say is….check out Aili and her colleagues’ fine work for yourself. It is a great intro to SL in general…and more importantly it sets up a lot of questions about the yet-to-be grokked possibilities for avatar-mediated interaction.

BTW, even though the title is “Dating and Mating in Secondlife,” rest assured that there is nothing whatsoever in this video that I would deem to be offensive. It is simply an enlightening conversation between the researchers/journalists where they very discuss their findings.

Too tired now to figure out how embed this particular video into my page.

Just click here and then click on video. It is only one additional click…go ahead click….one more time…..click…now that was not so bad was it? ; )

Web 2.0 and Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)

Crazy week this week. First I was sick as a dog with some crazy bug where I could hang on during the day but at night I would get this killer sore throat that kept me up all night in bad pain. That would be OK except that this week I had to be in NY and Boston all in the one week.

Anyway enough about me and my woes. Onto the good stuff….

I was fortunate enough to be asked to contribute at the e-Learning Guild in two different forums this week:

Tony Karrer, hoodwinked Brent Schelenker, Steven Downes and yours truly to talk about Web 2.0 (and a bit of 3D) meets Corporate Learning — or if that is not what it was he wanted us to talk about it is certainly where it went.

I’ve known Tony for a while….and I am a big fan of both Steven and Brent’s via daily reading of their Blogs. I think because of this, we were kinda able to get right into it and riff because we each knew where each other stood and we got to take the conversation into the generative learning and co-creation stage very quickly.

This is also one of the coolest things about Web 2.0 that we talked about on the panel. First and foremost Steven made the point that your approach as an educator should not be “OK let me figure out what blogs, wikis, social tagging, You Tube, Second Life and Moodle mean for my learning strategy or my learners.” Instead Steven suggests you start in the most obvious place…Where might that be? you ask…Why YOU and your own learning of course Steven says.

Time is on the same channel here:

First, get an account on blogger and start to converse publically. This is step one in what Steven calls your Personal Learning Environment (PLE). BTW Jay Cross is on a similar trip here and both Steven and Jay acknowledge they have not Grokked the solution but they are equally passionate about the idea.

We then got into….once you start with a blog, (Hello WordPress/Blogger) your learning starts to take off. You start to get motivated to want to find a tool that helps make your space more conversational and co-creative/crowsourced in terms of production/interpretation of content/ideas (Hello Wiki). You then want to throw in some pictures (Hello Flickr/OFoto) and inevitibely want to find (or create) audio (Hello Odeo) and video (Hello Jumpcut, Eyespot and YouTube/Google Video) that further emphasize your point. You then want to take all these different piece parts together into a single place that is just for you (Hello MySpace….oh that is so yesterday why not build it out in 3D in Secondlife)…and suddenly you start to understand that we have finally tipped on a number of fronts:

Web services meets Web 2.0 which means that it becomes easier for people (not just programmers to be prosumers)
Centrally Created Content/Control moves towards User Generated Content/Sharing
Content is king but Context is the Kingdom
Power on all levels is moving towards the consumer (kinda like banks with ATMs only about everything) but consumers are also becoming producers.
Consumption moves towards Prosumption

In double-looping on this I ponder….Is it just me or did you notice that either Google or Yahoo is snapping everything up this food chain. So Rupert did interrupt the cycle and Cisco did Buy WEBEX…but how ’bout the 3D space. If you think about it 2D interactive platforms that have aggregated eyeballs (either Myspace in the Consumer space or Webex in the Corporate space) are, IMHO, all going to end up in the 3D space. All you gotta do is look at what is going on in Korea with CyWorld to see that. And Korea is the place to look to as they are the leading adopters in this space as it was with DoCoMo in mobile many years ago in Japan.

Anyway enough about that. Those of you who are either digital natives and just do this or digital immigrants like me who work like the dickens to live/learn/work this way know that the learning (and responsibility to contribute..which is why I am sitting here exhausted on a Friday night but feeling the need to share) is so poweful that it literally changes the game.

Keep a watch on Jay and Steven to see where they go next on PLEs…it is good stuff.

Virtual World and Game Change Update

I have been out on vacation then down with some crazy bug and on top of that my notes has been crashed for two days. Choosing to be off-grid for vacation was fun. Not being able to be on-grid to deal with the deluge of mail due to me being off-grid is not.

e-mail truly is a killer app. It is killing the CIO because as technology gets wiz-bangier folks love to send around flash and ppts that weigh the digital equivalent of a ton and the digital highways that the CIO must fund are stressed to the max from all the heavy traffic. More importantly, e-mail is a killer applicaiton because it is killing us humans. OK, maybe not killing us, but certainly dramatically reducing our ability to focus for any reasonable length of time. e-mail is probably the biggest contributor to the fact the most of us have been reduced to having the attention span of a nat, or a ferrett on two cappucinos.

Anyway, on to other things. Virtual Worlds Day II was great. It focused more on the meat and potatoes side of the potential for this technology. Joe Miller of Second Life was kind enough to use one of my charts to describe the evolution of the web:

A lot of folks seemed to resonate with this chart although as I mentioned in an earlier post, many well known thinkers in this field like Henry Jenkins warn against continuum charts like this. You can read more about this from my previous post on entrepreneurial capitalism here. BTW, I got a nice surprise while on vacation….A note from none other than Joe Pine of “Experience Economy” fame where he said “I recently caught up with your post on Second Life and the Experience Economy — and, yes, the former is absolutely a platform for the latter! A platform I’m increasingly enamored with for its potential. I actually think it not just a platform but a new medium for experiences.”

OK, back to task – I did mention I have ADD Right?

Upon reflection of the two days at VW, I am seeing a similar meme to what happened in Web 1.0. Back then, the SIZZLE was all about Business to Consumer (B2C) which focused on Marketing/Branding/Advertising. Remeber the Sock Puppet from Pets.com and a ton of other similar ploys to establish presence and leverage brands with little or no back-end to crazy valuations? The STEAK was in the Business to Employee (B2E) space where companies leveraged the differentiating capabilities of this technology to enable self-service for employees allowing better access and usage to information and services by employees at dramatically lower costs. Finally the SPECIAL SAUCE for Web 1.0 (and the place where the biggest bucks were made) was in the Business to Business (B2B) space.

My colleague at IBM, Peter Finn came up with the terms Intraverse and Interverse to bring a 3D flavor to the 2D concepts of intranets and internets. Metaverse is reserved for Neal Stepenson. BTW Ruben Steiger of Millions of Us had a very funny story of how he met Neal and told him that they had created the Metaverse with SecondLife…Neal’s response…”cool.” That was it, nothing more.

Coming out of the VW conference, I think that MTV is bringing a lot of Sizzle to the B2C space. That being said, it is intersting to note that they are building their Laguna Beach, The Hills and Pimp My Ride destinations on the There Platfrorm and working with Game Designers to get the production/addiction quality where they want it to be and to have more control over the worlds. In a way, Secondlife is the ultimate B2C play as the consumer is the producer (or prosumer as Tapscott would like to say). Joe Miller reckons that residents contribute over a billion dollars worth of content creation a year to SL as things stand today. That is prosumption at its wildest!

On the Business to Employee side, players like Forterra and Proton Media provide industrial grade 3D worlds built to reside behind a company’s firewall and integrate with other enterprise apps which is a core requirment to deliver value in the B2E space. Finally, Multiverse’s notion of universal browser that allows folks who use their platform to connect worlds through that browser gives us the first notion of the Interverse and is well worth keeping track of.

So when it comest to 3Di there is Sizzle, there is Steak and there is Special Sauce. We need the sizzle to create the interest, we need the steak to show how real business to employee applications can be achieved via the application of 3D technology and we will ultimately (3-4 years out according to most panelists at VW) get the special sauce that allows all of this to connect in a seamless way.

Don’t know about you all, but I got my Fork and my Steak Knife and I am ready to chow down on the 3D future!