Here in the Management Information Systems department of the Temple University Fox School of Business we’ve developed an innovative system for motivating students to engage in their Professional Development.

Here’s how our department chair, Munir Mandviwalla, describes it:

We implemented a point system for our program about 1.5 years ago so that students need to achieve 1000 professional development points before they can graduate. More recently, we introduced a leaderboard that showcases the students with the most amount of points. Today, I am pleased to announce ‘professional achievement’ badges for our students.

The badge levels are:

• Grand Master (2000 plus): The pinnacle of professional readiness. Grand Master’s have extensive experience in engaging with industry, have demonstrated extensive leadership and communication skills, and are likely to take on leadership roles in the future.
• Master (1500 plus): The master of professional achievement. Master’s have gone above and beyond all the basic requirements and excelled in every category of professional development, career knowledge, networking and are expected to be stars in their careers.
• Candidate (1000 plus): The complete well rounded student. Candidates have excelled in meeting all the department’s requirements for professional development. They are ready for the workplace!
• Apprentice (700 plus): Apprentices have started investing in their professional development early and are well on track to meet the department’s requirements for professional achievement.

Coming up with appropriate labels and a way to describe it all was incredibly challenging! We will do a soft roll out over the summer and then more formally in the fall. I am sure we will learn from this experience and after a year we will take another look at the levels, labels, and point categories and revise and improve.

As Munir says, it’s not easy to define meaningful levels and appealing badges. And, yet, it’s one of those many little details that goes into designing and implementing effective gamification.

What do you think? Would a system of points, levels, and badges have helped you work harder on your own professional development in college? If you hire recent college graduates, would a badge like this be of value to you in assessing student abilities?

Are You My Tribe?

I received an email last week asking me for advice about starting a new online community (thank you, ML).

I am thinking about starting my own social network. I have many questions. I was wondering do you think you could do a blog post about starting a social network? What do you think about the Ning platform? Which platform do you think would be best?

Even though I’ve formally studied online communities for nearly a decade, I found the question surprisingly difficult to answer. Nonetheless, here’s my summation of the 3 most important considerations for stating an online community.

1. Tribe or Guild?

At the most basic level, people are looking for one of two things in an online community:

• Social: a place to hang out with friends, or
• Information: a place to get answers to questions.

The best social networks provide both, but one or the other is the primary reason a group exists. (Tribes have guilds and guild members also form tribes.)

What can you provide? Do you have a particular talent for “throwing a good party”? In that case, you just might  pull off the exceeding difficult task of forging a tribe. People with common sensibilities are out there wandering the web, they are just really hard to find. (Hint: It helps if you can jump-start the process by co-opting an existing tribe.)

Or, are you more interested in hanging out with people who can share tips and tricks about a common interest? That’s the more typical route for an online community… guild members who swap stories, resources, and insights about an area of interest.

Pick one: tribe or guild. That’s your starting point for a clear vision.

2. Platforms Don’t Matter (Much), Only People Do

I can distinctly remember the first social network I was active in back in the late-1980′s … a bulletin-board like system for students, faculty, and staff of William & Mary (platform was Participate by Unison running on Primos). Green screens with 80 character columns.

Nothing fancy. No color. Not even bold or italics. Just text.

Yet, there was a strong sense of community. Countless hours to be wasted. It was great fun.

Now, the right platform can make it easier for people to find your community. It can make it easier to organize content, share responsibilities, and shape behaviors. But, the platform does not matter unless people want to be there.

Choosing the platform is one of the least important decisions. Identify a clear vision, create compelling value to members, and cultivate a bottomless reserve of patience and determination. That’s what will see your new community through.

3. The Big Secret

My most important advice for starting an online community is: don’t do it.

There are millions of online communities and social networks. If your interest is so obscure that no one is yet talking about it online, how will you ever attract enough interest to sustain a community?

Instead of forming a brand new online community, look hard and long for your existing tribe or your existing guild. Odds are good they will welcome your energy and enthusiasm. It’s not just the first follower, but also the second, third, fourth, and thousandth that make a community. You provide an invaluable service by channeling your energy and enthusiasm into an existing venture.

Your Turn

What do you think? Is there room on the world wide web for yet another social network? If you were starting an online community today, what platform would you recommend?

Image credit: Smithsonian Institution (no known copyright)

Some people like bombs, others just Like Bomb.

Among active Facebook users, the term “Like Bomb” describes someone rapidly liking a whole bunch of content on your wall. The question is when, if ever, is this a good thing to do?

Like so much else in life, one person’s trash is another’s treasures. Some people love broccoli, other’s can’t abide it. Some people love seeing a long, raid list of notifications show up. Others, especially those who get Facebook notifications on their cell phone or email Inbox, may find it highly annoying.

And, thus, there’s a simple answer:

• If you don’t know someone well enough to predict their reaction, it’s probably a bad idea to Like Bomb their Facebook wall.
• If someone hits your wall hard, it’s fair game to return the favor.
• If you’re looking to engage with someone on Facebook, hit like a maximum of 3-5 items and craft a heart-felt comment.

Another word of warning: too many likes in a rapid span and you’ll end up in Facebook jail. That’s a temporary (but highly annoying) condition whereby Facebook disables the like (and/or commenting) features for your account.

What do you think? Are you happy or annoyed when someone blows up your Facebook notification stream with a dozen or more likes?

Image Source: The Library of Congress, no known copyright

Google Glass (from Wikipedia)

A story aired on NPR this morning about the backlash Google Glass is already facing, even before it is generally available:

Right now, Google Glass might be the world’s worst spy camera; if you go out in public with a pair on, you are guaranteed to attract attention. Still, the idea of techies mounting a tiny screen and a little camera to their faces makes millions of people uncomfortable.

According to Sarah Rotman Epps, a tech analyst at Forrester Research, that is why Google is rolling out Glass to the world slowly in stages.

“Google has been incredibly transparent … with their Glass rollout,” Epps says. “They realize that Google Glass will require shifting social norms to be accepted.”

The excitement about Google Glass reminds me of the buzz back in Fall, 2001 about Segway:

[Inventor Kamen] believes the Segway “will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.” He imagines them everywhere: in parks and at Disneyland, on battlefields and factory floors, but especially on downtown sidewalks from Seattle to Shanghai. “Cars are great for going long distances,” Kamen says, “but it makes no sense at all for people in cities to use a 4,000-lb. piece of metal to haul their 150-lb. asses around town.” In the future he envisions, cars will be banished from urban centers to make room for millions of “empowered pedestrians”–empowered, naturally, by Kamen’s brainchild.

Segway does not release sales figures, but best estimates are that no more than 100,000 units have shipped in a decade of sales.

Six years after the release of the Segway, another eagerly anticipated product hit the marketplace (from Jan., 2007):

After more than two years in the making, Apple CEO Steve Jobs Tuesday announced the company’s intention to enter the mobile handset market, unveiling the new Apple iPhone. The iPhone brings together several features of the iPod, digital camera, smart phones and even portable computing to one device, with a widescreen display and an innovative input method.

“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” Jobs said.

Through six generations of releases Apple has now sold 300-350 million iPhones.

Image credit: Dylan Love in Business Insider

Google Glass: Segway or iPhone?

What is a better model for predicting the trajectory of Google Glass?

Will Google Glass suffer the same disappointing fate as Segway? Will it wilt under the weight of high expectations and resistance to change? Or, is it a revolutionary product that defines a new mode of communication and computing?

In its favor, Google Glass is less expensive, is a natural evolution of existing products and has a supportive ecosystem of developers. Yet, as Ms. Epps said, “Google Glass will require shifting social norms to be accepted.” Demonstrating the risks, cafes, casinos, and other locations with privacy concerns have already moved to ban the use of Google Glass.

Google is pioneering an entirely new model of computing usage. Early users reviews are positive, but without a consumer price tag it is difficult to predict consumer viability. There’s a big difference in the level of consumer demand for a $200 product than a $500 one. Also, Google still has time to address privacy concerns. (For example, it could add a visible indicator showing when a device is recording.)

Also, if the long rumored segment of smart-watches emerges, Google Glass will face competition. There is no doubt a huge market for even more portable Internet-enabled smart devices, but it is too early to tell what form factor will gain social acceptance.

What do you think? Will Google Glass be the next iPhone or the next Segway?

Not a mail chimp.

I decided to bite the bullet and migrate off of Jetpack for managing subscriptions to this blog. Instead, I’m now giving MailChimp a try (thank you to Jeff H. for the recommendation).

One of the reasons I’m moving is that Jetpack provides me, as the blog author, with no control over subscriptions. I can see a list of email addresses for subscribers but have no control over what is sent, when it is sent, or to remove someone from a list.

Alas, that means that those of you who have subscribed via Jetpack are going to get this blog post sent to you twice: first via Jetpack and second via MailChimp (though not necessarily in that order!).

You are free to unsubscribe from either list (or both, though I’d prefer you didn’t!). If you’re not sure which to decide, I suggest keeping the MailChimp subscription and dropping the Jetpack one. That way if I ever end up moving those blog to another spot on the Internet, your subscription will remain intact.

That you for dealing with this one-time inconvenience of the switch-over.

And, if you’re not a subscriber and would like to be, either fill out the form at the top-left-hand side of this blog or head here to subscribe.

Image credit: George Eastman House

Update for subscribers: I screwed up. I setup MailChimp incorrectly yesterday and you got a strange looking template email. I think it’s all correct now… I apologize for messing up and having a junk email sent to you!

If only there was a gauge like this to measure blog health

Today’s “ask an expert” question from Klout.com is:

What are some characteristics shared by the best blogs?

My answer:

The best blogs:
1. Convey informed passion about a topic,
2. Share a mix of opinion and facts in a consistent voice… regular readers know what to expect,
3. Are updated consistently so there’s a reason to return,
4. Have a mix of words, pictures and/or video.
5. Cultivate community in comments.

What do you think makes a great blog?

Image Credit: The U.S. National Archives

Young people think they can perform two challenging tasks at once, Meyer acknowledges, but “they are deluded,” he declares. It’s difficult for anyone to properly evaluate how well his or her own mental processes are operating, he points out, because most of these processes are unconscious. And, Meyer adds, “there’s nothing magical about the brains of so-called ‘digital natives’ that keeps them from suffering the inefficiencies of multitasking. They may like to do it, they may even be addicted to it, but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s far better to focus on one task from start to finish.”

In thinking about my own teaching strategies, I realized I’ve been using multiple methods to channel multi-taskers and help them maintain focus.

For Assignments

• I have students prepare a short summary of assigned reading. This helps students maintain attention in small manageable pieces while promoting active reading.
• In other writing assignments, I provide students with a detailed outline with what is expected in each section. Although there is no question that writing a research paper from beginning to end is a valuable skill, that’s not the focus of my courses. More importantly, I view this scaffolding as an appropriate way to help students develop those skill.

During Class

• Every class involves a variety of activities (e.g., listening, talking, watching, reading, writing, thinking, and doing). I mostly teach courses that meet one day a week in the evening. The time goes by more quickly when there’s a variety of tasks and experiences.
• Changing up a student’s cognitive load with some moments demanding high concentration (like a 5-minute quiz) and others providing down time (like pauses between student presentations) increases stamina.
• I frequently invite guest speakers. Meeting a new person activates social energies, one of the frequent causes of interruption. Also, like teens visiting a friends house, students tend to be on their best behavior when there’s a guest at class.
• To help channel student multi-tasking tendencies, I invite them to live-tweet guest speaker visits. This has an extra benefit of providing a permanent record of the event with valuable feedback to the speaker.
• Just about every class I have students do “break-out” where they discuss a topic in groups of 2-4 students. Each group then reports back out to the class, providing a structured discussion of the topic. There’s no hiding in a small group, making it harder to attempt to multi-task. Also, students naturally tend to compare their own responses to other groups, so that’s also an engaging activity.

Of course, the best way to minimize the disruptions of multi-tasking is to train ourselves to focus. Here’s helpful advice from Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University–Dominguez Hills:

This ability to resist the lure of technology can be consciously cultivated, Rosen maintains. He advises students to take “tech breaks” to satisfy their cravings for electronic communication: After they’ve labored on their schoolwork uninterrupted for 15 minutes, they can allow themselves two minutes to text, check websites, and post to their hearts’ content. Then the devices get turned off for another 15 minutes of academics.

What’s your strategy for avoiding the pitfalls of multi-tasking? Have you found anything in classroom settings that is particularly helpful?

Image credit: Steven L. Johnson

What are the best books for someone who is looking to broaden their management skills and why?

My response:

Here’s a set of classics with timeless advice for personal and organizational success: How to Win Friends and Influence People, Carnegie; The One Minute Manager, Blanchard & Johnson; Built to Last, Collins & Porras; Good to Great, Collins; High Output Management, Grove; Crossing the Chasm, Moore.

And, here they are in a convenient list:

What would you add to this list? Why?

“I am so totally going to blog about this party.”

Today’s question from Klout:

Are social media websites like Twitter and Facebook killing the blog? Why or why not?

My answer:

I think overall that Twitter and Facebook are helping, rather than hurting, blogs because they make it easier to find good blog content. There’s still an interest in reading (and writing) content that fits better on a blog. Also, many people like the flexibility and control of having their own site.

Additional thoughts…

• TV didn’t kill radio. I predict that blogging, just like email lists and discussion forums, will endure in some form.
• Blogging as content marketing can be incredibly powerful. While organizations benefit from using Twitter and Facebook to amplify their message and to interact with others, putting original content on your own website keeps you in control of your digital destiny.
• If Twitter and Facebook were going to kill blogs, it would have happened already. There’s room for lots of ways to express yourself.
• If you want a longer take on this subject, I recommend “Is Blogging Dead?” by Mike Myatt. An alternative view (ironically, presented in a blog post) is offered in Francine Hardaway in “Why Blogging is Dead–And, What’s Next“.

With so many people on social networking sites, do you think that helps or hurts blogs?

Live-Blogging Old Style

Today’s question from Klout is:

What’s the easiest way to live blog an event and why?

My response (links added here):

What works for me is to live-tweet and then post a collection of tweets as a blog post (a service like Storify makes that easy to do). I like this approach because I can easily monitor or amplify (RT) what others say and also post pictures. Twitter also helps me keep updates short and snappy.

Some additional advice:

• Have a story arch: introduce the event, post (or paint) a picture of the setting, do your updates during the event, and also provide an acknowledgement of when the event ends. 
• Provide a summary and highlights, not a transcript!
• Be generous with credit: live-blogging is a great way to build connections by highlighting interesting things that other people are saying and doing.
• Engage in dialogue with those following along.
• Don’t forget to update your live-blog post with relevant links to the event’s official website and other information that will provide useful context for someone who reads the post later.

What do you think makes a good live-blog? Any advice to others who want to live-blog an event

Activity Structure

The structure of the activity is:

1. Present brief scenarios.

2. Assign student teams to advocate for the “agree” and “disagree” sides of the argument.

3. Give students time to develop those arguments.

4. For each of the three scenarios:

• Take a vote on student positions.
• Have the “agree” and “disagree” teams present their arguments.
• Have any other students also offer justification for their stance.
• Take another vote to see if positions have changed.

This is the first time I’ve done this activity and I think that structure worked well.

Which path do you choose?

Social Media Scenarios

Here are the three scenarios I created.

Scenario #A: One of your co-workers has signed up for the free version of a direct competitors product. One day they get an email blast about a major customer issue and the email was accidently sent with all of the recipients in the cc field instead of the bcc field. Your co-worker suggests adding all of those email addresses to your company’s marketing email list. Do you agree?

Scenario #B: One of your co-workers is assigned to investigate strengths and weakness of a competitor’s product. They create a website on your company’s intranet (e.g., only viewable by employees) that quotes from every negative consumer review they can find on social media or product review websites. One of your co-workers thinks that info should be posted as an anonymous public website. Do you agree?

Scenario #C: You work for a company with a small but loyal customer base. The company has cash flow problems and is concerned about making the next payroll. It may not be able to pay employees like you! A direct marketing firm offers a substantial amount of money if you will sell them the email list of your customers. Your TOS (terms of service) say you will never sell customers’ personal information but it also says the terms can be unilaterally changed at any time. Do you sell the email list to keep the company afloat?

When I use this activity again, I’ll likely tweak the scenarios a little bit. I’d also love to find videos or real-world examples that could be used instead. (If you know of any, please share!)

Outcomes

In initial voting, the students were divided on Scenarios #A and #C (roughly 25% to 75%). When students changed their mind it was a small movement towards the majority opinion. There was almost no-one voting for the “Agree” side of Scenario #B.

If you’re interested in seeing more details on how I administered this, here’s a copy of the hand-out I created: Prof. Johnson Social Media Ethics Activity.

Thank You

A major thank you to everyone who responded to my Twitter and Facebook requests for input on social media ethical issues. It was very helpful.

What do you think? Are these realistic scenarios? What are other scenarios you think students about to enter the workforce should be well-informed about?

Image credit: Go Away! by Steven L. Johnson

The most popular music genres explained in one simple Venn diagram.

What advice can you give someone who wants to make money blogging?

If your motivation is making money, blogging is not for you. But, if there is a topic you are passionate about, you can build an audience for your writing, and you’ve got the tenacity to post regularly for at least a year… then advertising and affiliate links may generate a small bit of money.

What do you think? Is it possible to make good money by blogging? If so, how?

Do you believe social media can be addictive? Why or why not?

Here’s my response:

Yes, social media can absolutely be addictive. Variable, intermittent responses are highly habit-forming. Sometimes you’ll have a response, sometimes not, and it’s impossible to predict. Even when there’s no response, it’s easy to find something new to start that cycle of engagement again.

To learn more about intermittent reinforcements check out this section of the Wikipedia page on reinforcement.

Here’s a list of the 5 most commented on posts at the Course Participation Hub:

• Should there be a minimum age requirement to use social media? by Xin Qu
• What are the risks you are most concerned with social media? by Sunghee Hong
• Who are the main users of Social media? by Chunyong Huang
• How engaged are you with companies on social networking sites? by Benny Nasimeuang
• What do you think about social media? by Xiujuan Chen

And, here are the 5 most viewed student blogs: 

• My Malian Experience by Laqwonda Wilson
• Food Trucks on Campus by James Davanzo
• Pursuit a healthy college life by Li Jiang
• Musings on Mobile by Scott Raff
• Chen’s footprint map by Chen Feng

Check it out, there’s some great stuff there!

Temple University is delighted to host the AT&T Temple Edutech Hackathon on April 5th and 6th at Alter Hall to anyone interested in creating mobile and web applications that can help impact Philadelphia’s education community. Anyone at Temple University can participate this first Hackathon at Temple University.

AT&T, Temple University’s Urban Apps & Maps, Jarvus Innovations, andTechnically Philly are keeping the momentum moving after TechCamp Education: Philadelphia, where nearly 20 projects were started that could impact students, educators and parents in Philadelphia. We want Temple Community to join the rest of Philadelphia civic hacking community to solve REAL education problems identified by the School District and Philadelphia Housing Authority.

The Hackathon is generously supported by AT&T’s Developer Program team, which organizes hackathons across the U.S.  They offer prizes, experience, support and more to help you learn about new technologies and crank out innovative apps in just 24 hours.  The event is also supported by the Institute of Business and Information Technology at Temple University who provides food and drink on Saturday.

This supercharged event begins Friday night with lightning talks where technology sponsors and educators introduce developers to exciting new platforms or tools to build smarter and faster. By asking the question “what if…” attendees are able to explore the fringes of technology and the physical world to depths that you and I have only dreamed about. Bring a friend as you travel down this path of app creation and work collectively to turn your concepts into reality.

Since your will working in a team, ANY Temple Students, developer or not, will be able to contribute to this exciting event. Furthermore, the event will provide an incredible opportunity to build network with leading app developers and designers in the region.

We Supply: Quick presentations and code samples that help to bootstrap your hacking, food to keep you going, and caffeine to keep you awake. Along with technical senseis to assist you in building faster, smarter, and with new tools.

You Bring: Your laptop, skills & ideas. Come with a collaborative, team focused mindset and/or team up in advance on Twitter/Facebook/Google+ via the #atthack hashtag. Whether you are a backend person and code in Ruby/PHP/.NET or are a designer and only work with Illustrator, you are invited to attend this event. Every group needs a good balance of talent and your development skills are needed!

Event Schedule.  The following is a list of the weekends agenda:

• 06PM – Friday Evening - Kickoff event with drinks, networking and dinner!
• 07PM – Friday Evening - Lightning talks from the guest speakers listed below
• 08PM – Friday Evening - Idea pitches and team formation

• 10AM – Saturday Morning -  The fun continues with an all day hackathon. Work with the teams that you formed on Friday night to produce the app spec’d out the night before. Senseis will be available throughout the entire event to help you code up your solution. App submissions will be accepted throughout the day with a deadline of 6PM.

• 06PM – Saturday Evening - Promptly at 6PM, teams will begin pitching their ventures with direct immediate feedback from a panel of judges. Finalists will be chosen who will compete for prizes later during the April 23rd Philly Tech Week Demo presentation event “Switch Philly.”

***************************************************************************************

• April 8 – Wednesday - at Devnuts: Teams will continue to polish their projects for the Philly Tech Week demo presentation, where prizes will be awarded.
• April 15 – Wednesday - at Devnuts: Teams will continue to polish their projects for the Philly Tech Week demo presentation, where prizes will be awarded.
• April 22 – Monday -  at Temple University: Urban Apps & Maps Studios Open House. All Temple Teams will present their work and Temple Award will be awarded to the best Temple Student projects.
• April 23 – Tuesday - Switch Philly Demo Presentation night: During Philly Tech Week 2013 presented by AT&T, the hard work spent during the months of March and April will be rewarded with a demo presentation event where prizes will be awarded to the best education projects.

Prizes. The following prizes are experiential and geared towards accelerating you towards a successful business as well as expanding your network and industry knowledge:

• Grand Prize – $5,000 startup grant, plus business services provided in-kind from local partners (TBD)
• Idea Prize – One free month of Azure (no CC required) and Azure Services

Together with the generous support from Temple University Computer Services, we are able to offer additional awards to all Temple students :

• 1st Place Temple Student Prize: $2,500
• 2nd Place Temple Student Prize: $1,500
• 3rd Place Temple Student Prize: $1,000

Judging Criteria. Apps will be judged based on the criteria below and weighted accordingly.

• 33% Weight – Concept

• 33% Weight – Development progress

• 33% Weight – Implementation opportunity

Social Media. 

• Follow us @hackathonlive for live updates and photos from the event

• “Like” us on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/AttMobileAppHackathon

Registration.

Please register at http://hackphilly.eventbrite.com/.

Here’s an archive of live blogging from her visit:

Here’s an archive of live blogging from his visit:

I hope you’ll check them out. Here’s a good set to start with:

• Foursquare (by Jim Davanzo and Yin Liu)
• Pinterest (by Emily McFadden and Ancy Thomas)
• Stumbleupon (by Ryan Williams, James Griffith, and Brian Doria)
• TripAdvisor (by Kathryn Cudemo, Jonathan Abraham and Julie Ho)
• Weibo (by Xiujuan Chen, Chunyong Huang, Yixin Lin, and Xin Qu)

And, here’s the rest:

• Facebook (by Johnie Gray and Laqwonda Wilson)
• Facebook 2 (by Sunghee Hong, Thomas Lyons, Benny Nasimeuang)
• Flickr (by Danielle Domanico and Marisol Bautista)
• FoodSpotting (by Sal Caruso and Jennie Quattrocchi)
• Instagram (by Bernardo Juncal, Scott Mingora, Tuanh Nguyen, and Alex Schwartz)
• Reddit (by Scott Raff, Damon Isaac, and Caitlin Carr)
• Reddit #2 (by Neil Patel, Kyle Blackstone, and Rachel Bitting)
• Reddit #3 (by Mun Khin Chin, Chunru Liu, Pragya Mantri, and Jielin Zhang)
• Twitter – Team Yo, South Philly (by Ryan Maguire and Maureen Saraullo)
• Twitter: Social Media Mafia (by Camilo Lopez, Marc Frutchey, and Rachel Hutchison)
• YELP (by Anh Nguyen,Li Jiang, and Chen Feng)

Which is your favorite?

One of the biggest advantages of a citation management tool is automatic bibliography creation. Alas, as I work on multiple revisions of a file, I sometimes get snagged by cut-and-paste issues with EndNote field codes disappearing. The result references in the text that looks just fine, but lacking those magic hidden fields they don’t show up in the automatically generated bibliography.

Here’s the simplest way I’ve found to catch those missing references. When reviewing a draft copy, turn on the EndNote feature that both hyperlinks references and underlines them. Here’s a screen shot showing the options to select:

EndNote tip: Enable these options to catch all your citations.

Now as you’re proofreading your text it’ll be immediately obvious which citations are lacking the field codes to appear in the bibliography.

Here’s a list of the 5 most commented on posts at the Course Participation Hub:

1. LinkedIn, does it even work?  by Camilo Lopez
2. Social Media and Students  by  Anh Nguyen
3. Evolution of Social Media Value – Kyle Blackstone
4. Which company would you work for – by Danielle Domanico
5. Which Web Browser Best Supports Your Social Media Demands? by Marc Frutchey

And, here are the 5 student blogs with the most views:

1. Exploring Philadelphia by Camilo A. Lopez
2. Food Trucks on Campus by James Davanzo
3. pursuit a healthy college life by Li Jiang
4. Musings on Mobile by Scott Raff
5. Sal’s Movie Reviews by Salvatore Caruso

The students have posted a lot of great content. What’s caught your eye?

Is there an administrator, faculty member, or student who you feel made a significant contribution to the students and extended community of the MIS department during the calendar year 2011?

Complete the nomination form for a deserving recipient TODAY!

Student Leadership - Awarded annually to a student who has made a significant contribution to the students and extended community of the MIS department.
Eligibility: All full time undergraduate MIS students, all full and part-time MIS graduate students.

Faculty Leadership - This award is given annually to a faculty member who has made a significant contribution to the students and extended community of the MIS department.
Eligibility: Full and part-time faculty who have been employed at Temple for at least two semesters including the current term.

Administrative Leadership - This award is given annually to an administrator who has made a significant contribution to the students and extended community of the MIS department.
Eligibility: Full time administrators of the Fox School of Business and Management (or other Temple U. administrators  who have been employed at Temple for at least two semesters including the current term.

Thank you for your attention to this important matter!

There isn’t one. But, here are five trends I predict will be important in 2013 for social media innovators.

1. Retrenchment. It’s a tough environment for a new Instagram or Pinterest to break-out. Instead, I think individuals and organizations will focus on gaining a return on investment from the time and money they’ve invested already. After a period of exploration and experimentation, it’s back to the basics.

Silver Lining: There’s always room for a new casual game.

2. Engagement. Building on #1, it is a time for deeper engagement on fewer platforms. For an individual this looks like: more intentional social networking and more time on their favorite platforms. For those building a business online, a lot more people will implement loyalty programs and other forms of gamification.

Opportunity: There’s a stable set of mature well-established social media platforms. With focus, you can quickly develop expertise in less frequently used, but still powerful, features of them.

The future Internet will also have lots of cats.

3. Small Screens. It’s pretty obvious: the PC era is turning into a mobile device era. It’s less obvious how business should react. My advice: think twice, and then think twice again, before creating an mobile app. Instead, relentless test, retest, and optimize the heck out of your existing web content for access via small screens.

Challenge: If you’ve already developed a mobile application, it will be painful to drop.

4. Micro-community. Whereas the large horizontal social networks are entering a period of mature consolidation, there’s plenty of room for niche interest-based and geography-based services. Content marketing is as powerful as ever and if you can create a online community around your brand, that’s pure marketing gold. No one has figured out a scalable business model for hyper-local news, but that shouldn’t stop you from creating a hyper-local network around your brand, products, or location.

Challenge: picking the right size target and having the patience to foster slow organic growth.

5. Problem Solving. Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. Maintaining a consistent robust presence on multiple social media platforms is tedious. Address that challenge, and the you’ve got a viable offering.

Tip: if you aren’t using if-this-than-that (IFTTT.com), check it out. It’s the Swiss Army Knife of mousetraps.

Your Turn

Do you agree with these 5 trends? What do you see in your social meda future?

Image credit: Cat and Peking Duck special by Steven-L-Johnson on Flickr

by Images_of_Money

• Head over to your website.
• Pretend you’re a first time visitor.
• Pretend you want to make an electronic inquiry.
• Find the most obvious method of online contact (usually up there in the “About” or “Contact Us” tab).
• Fill out the form or send off an email. In the notes section ask whoever receives it to call you immediately when they see it.
• Wait a moment (we’ll still be here).

Have you gotten that call yet? How long do you think is a reasonable wait to hear back?

Just guessing here, but I think most of us would expect–when we contact another organization–to hear back within 24 hours. Are you confident you’ll hear back that soon?

My recent experience has left me pessimistic:

• Months ago, I filled out the web form for a local pet training service. Never heard back.
• About the same time, I filled out the web inquiry form for a local contractor. I eventually spoke to them on the phone and they admitted they never check emails.
• Last week I filled out a web form asking for more information about a piece of real estate for sale. No response.
• Earlier this week, I sent an email to the address specified on the website of a local medium sized organization. Haven’t heard anything back.

After spending good money to build a website that generates leads, that money is being thrown away.

I work on a college campus. If you’re not prepared to do business online, don’t worry: the students I’m training here are.

They’ll be glad to take those leads off your hands. And, if you never call me back, chances are, they will.

What’s your experience? Are you getting all the leads you’ve paid for?

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once suggested that, properly organized, education should proceed through three stages. In the first stage, that of romance, the student’s interest is aroused; he or she is brought face to face with the object of study in all its power and mystery. If the subject is mechanical engineering, for example, the student could be taken to see a steam locomotive or a steel mill in operation. In the second stage, labeled discipline the student acquires the concepts and methods required to analyze the subject and its parts and processes. In the third stage, that of fruition, the methods and concepts are applied to the subject so its structure and functioning may be understood and, perhaps, improved (Whitehead, 1929).

From W. Richard Scott’s Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems (pg. 3).

Students can instantly earn points and badges for creating a blog, creating blog posts, commenting, and a handful of surprise WordPress-related activities. There’s also several dozen more complex activities they can submit for review, with those achievements being granted every 24-48 hours.

Badges used in Fall 2012

The class website displays a leaderboard with the twelve highest scoring students. Finally, at the end of each weekly class meeting students an even larger list of students are recognized for “leveling-up.”

Here are three key lessons I have learned through student feedback.

1) Students report that the experience is fun and motivates them to do more work:

It adds an extra element of fun, which I think engages class more so than not. Definitely not time wasted.

I think this approach works well. I know for me personally it pushes me to do more activities and comment on posts more. I am not sure why that it but it does make things a little more competitive.

There is a lot of information and tasks to be done in this course. With that said I enjoy the gamification aspect of it because it gives these tasks we need to complete a sense of urgency and fun.

I loved this course and I enjoyed everything about it. … After learning how to get the information it was definitely motivational to see your name on the leader board even if it was for just a week or two.

I really enjoyed the gamifying of this course. It motivated me to be more up-to-date with the course materials. I just think it’s a nice little morale boost to have this kind of approach to a class. Although I’m not at the top of the leaderboard, it’s still fun to see how far I’ve come along. Gamifying also helped me become more proactive in my work.

The gamifying approach this course took made it so much more enjoyable for me to learn as a student. Not only was I learning, but I was earning points while learning the content.

Don’t change anything. This has been my favorite course at Temple. It was so enjoyable that the class came to be a hobby of mine.

2) The biggest boosts to motivation come from competing with other students, a sense of accomplishment, and recognition.

I wish more professors would gameify their courses. Gamification enables students to be academically competitive without accessing each other’s grades, and it’s my belief that it encourages students to participate more.

I think it adds a little more fun to the class. Although it isn’t something that I feel like I need to check every day it is a cool feeling to get points for assignments. I always get a little excited when I get an email that I unlocked an achievement.

I really like it. I like classes where I am able to turn things in on my own time. I am good at setting my own pace, so I was extremely successful at completing all of the projects in a timely manner without having to cram. I think gamifying the course is a great idea because it lets you know how you are doing compared to the rest of the class as well as who’s blog to check out as an example of an activity.

I personally like the gamifying approach because this particular course involves a great deal of outside the classroom work. Virtually all of our assignments are digital, so providing an interactive feedback system that keeps the students attention is helpful.

The badges helped me track what I had done and also provided reassurance that what I had submitted was received.

I very much enjoyed the freedom and flexibility that was offered with this class with the incentive that came from the Quest. It encouraged me to be a bit more aggressive, and who doesn’t like getting class recognition for your hard work??

3) There is a small percentage of students who do not find gamification motivational. (My best estimate is this is up to 5-10% of the students who have taken my course.) Even then, their view tends to be more neutral than negative.

I don’t like it because I am not into gaming but; I do appreciate your attempt to explore new options in order to keep up with technological trends. However, I don’t think you should do away with it in the future if it helps to engage students who otherwise wouldn’t be.

Honestly I didn’t pay much attention to it. I had so much else to worry about that being on a leader board didn’t seem to be the top priority for the class. My main goal was to complete the assignments I had to complete.

In summary, it has been a rewarding experience to gamify a college course. I think there is great potential for adding gamification to classes, particularly when coupled with self-directed learning.

Notes:

• This post is an update to an earlier description of the Gamification of MIS3538.
• The quotes are from students who took the class in Fall, 2012 and represent a full cross-section of performance (e.g., low-, medium-, and high-achievers). Average class size has been roughly 50 students per semester
• Press coverage of the gamfication of this course is available here.

… a dyad [relationship] in which members cooperate should be less satisfying than a dyad in which they alternate between cooperation (socialized action) and competition (individuated action). This position is clearly relevant to participation and human relations, since both place more emphasis on the development of cooperation than on the development of competition. Our position would suggest that greater involvement would occur in those situations where members where helped equally to compete and to cooperate.

Since he wrote this, I suspect there has been a societal shift to promoting competition as much, if not more, than cooperation. Regardless, the conclusion that alternating between the two mechanisms is better than a single one would still hold.

It’s a good reminder that one-size-does-not-fit-all.

Earlier this year Facebook bought Instagram. I’ve always figured Facebook would eventually merge Instagram functionality into a new and improved Facebook mobile application. Instagram makes it easy to post decent looking photos, even from a subpar mobile phone. That’s a feature that would enhance Facebook.

Instead of taking a great feature from Instagram and adding it to Facebook, the opposite has happened. One of the worst features of Facebook has arrived at Instagram.

I have 10,814 followers and follow 16,894 other accounts. Here’s my profile:

My Instagram Profile (StevenLJohnson)

Today I tried to follow back a new followers and Instagram said: “ Error: You can’t follow anymore people”

Error: You can’t follow anymore people

Looking into it, I found out that Instagram now allow me to follow only 7,500 other accounts.

I like to comment on my followers pictures and enjoy the exchanges that happen when they comment on mine. With this new hard limit, it means I can’t follow back any of my newest followers.

Even worse, if I want to follow anyone else, I have to unfollow 9,395 accounts first. Do you have any idea how long it takes to unfollow 9,395 accounts?

This is dumb, Instagram.

Punishing loyal early adopters is a bad business move. I thought I’d be using Instagram for a long time come. Now, I doubt it.

Instagram has rendered my account unusable for social networking.

Hard limits are stupid limits. Twitter has a sensible follow/follower ratio that serves a similar purpose in a reasonable way.

Meanwhile, until Instagram comes to its senses… does anyone know of another mobile photo sharing social network I can try out?

Brigitte Daniel visits @TempleUniv @FoxSchool #MIS3538

Top 5 Most Viewed Blogs

• Last Minute Fantasy Football by Steven Kucher
• Dude…Where’s the party at ?? By Adeel Rana
• DIY by Mary Nguyen
• auto performance by Ilya Dibner
• Experience Driven Social Media by Alana Elsey

Top 5 Most-Commented on Community Hub Posts

• Death of Print Magazine???? by Mohammad R Ali (29 comments)
• Did the Presidential debates convince you to change your vote? by Ethan Do (25 comments)
•  Cell Phone Providers by  Glenn Steigerwald (25 comments)
• Halloween by Greg Swenson (24 comments)
• How has social media benefitted your life? by Megan Stephens (23 comments)

Congratulations to Steven, Adeel, Mary, Ilya, Alana, Mohammad, Ethan, Glenn, Greg, and Megan!

• Evolution of the iPhone by Alex Cranmer
• Level Up Your Brain by John Dailey
• Whose Your Landlord by Ofo Ezeugwu
• Securing Facebook by Greg Swenson
• ETSY: What you need to know to be a successful seller by Amanda Arnott
• Food Truck Evolution by Michael Frey
• The iPhone 5! by Justin Lewis
• 6 Facts about the Brain by Courtney Minich
• History of the Legendary m3 by Ilya Dibner
• World Economies by Anderson Zuleta Medina

For more student infographics check out 12 Awesome Infographics Created with Piktochart.

Social Media and Traditional Media

Quick thoughts on what to expect on social media and traditional media with Hurricane Sandy.

• Standing out in a storm when you should be inside is not news coverage, it is disaster porn.
• In the name of covering news the traditional media will risk the lives of reporters and crews. Of course it’s hard for us to believe their hype when they’re not acting in a way consistent with it.

Screen capture from Good Morning America.

• Saavy media organizations have figured out that compiling user generated content (photos, video, and eyewitness reports) is a good investment.
• Some of those saavy media organizations will get punked. They’ll show footage of other storms, not the one in progress.

• Any change in routine can be stressful. Beyond the immediate challenges of dealing with bad weather widespread closings of work, transit, and school creates major disruptions.
• Major events can bring out the best in people. On Twitter a set of Sandy related hashtags has informal emerged with people sharing tips, news, and information (e.g., #sandy, #sandyinphilly, #sandychat,).
• People deal with stress in different ways. Some people channel anxiety into preparation. Others prefer to minimize the threat. Expect conflict when these two styles meet.

How to prepare for a storm: bring in those pets.

Photo credits: Steven L. Johnson (CC-ATR license)

In this round each group created a video about their technology of choice. If you’ve only got time to watch a few, here’s the best place to start:

• Classmates.com: Classmates.com in 2 minutes by Unera, Minich
• CouchSurfing: CouchSurfing in 2 Minutes by Cranmer, O’Clair, Ali
• FourSquare: FourSquare by Amanda, James and Megan
• Google+: Google Plus in 2 minutes by Greg Swenson, Chuck Bodner, Ravi Patel
• Pinterest: Pinterest in 2 Minutes by Mary Nguyen, Alice Chan, So Jeoung Kim
• SCVNGR: What is SCVNGR and why should you care? by Jamie Kim and Jason Stienmetz
• Spotify: Spotify Video by John A. Dailey, Evan Tracy

And, here’s the rest of the videos…

• Facebook: Facebook Video by cui zhong, Hangchan Huang, Xu zhao
• Flipboard: Flipboard Video by Stephanie Palko, Marisa Spanial
• Foursquare:
  • Foursquare by J. Garvey, O. Ezeugwu, A. Elsey
  • Foursquare in 2 minutes by Chase, Lewis and Kucher
• Google+: Google Plus by Morsalin, Chris Condello, Salman G
• Instagram: Instagram in 2 minutes by Zuleta, Jaimin Pandya, Adeel Rana
• LinkedIn
  • Linkedin by Derrick So & Kazuhiko Koyanagi
  • 2 Minutes About LinkedIn by Steigerwald, Do
• Pinterest: Pinterest Video Tutorial by Elisha Choo, Michael Pagan
• Sound Cloud: Sound Cloud by Dawkins, Poulin, Hunt
• YouTube:
  • YouTube Tutorial by Ilya, Olsian, Alexa
  • YOUTUBE MUSIC VIDEO by James Tang, Songzhen Lin, Devna Parmar
  • Youtube Video by Josh Stern, Stephanie Markman, and Juliana Agbo

All of these videos are also available in a Youtube Playlist.

Top 5 Most-Commented on Community Hub Posts

• Temple again???? by Devna Parmar
• WHAT IS/WAS YOUR FAVORITE CANDY? by Amanda Arnott
• Why do you use Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, etc. by Jamie Kim
• Places to Eat on Temple’s Campus by Courtney Minich
• iPhone5 vs. Samsung Galaxy S III by Mary Nguyen

And, an Honorable Mention to Courtney Minich for the most viewed post: Temple Made: Is Temple spending too much money on this campaign?

Top 5 Most Viewed Blogs

1. Dubai City of Gold by Salman Ghazwani
2. Feel-Good Social Media by Megan Stephens
3. Dude… Where is the Party at?? by Adeel Rana
4. Experience Driven Social Media by Alana Elsey
5. Makeup Hoarders Anonymous by Juliana Agbo

Congratulations to Salman for repeating in the most viewed blow category and to Megan, Adeel, Alana, and Juliana for their first appearance on the list.

This semester we are using the piktochart.com for both individual and group projects. Each student will create two infographics individually, and then one as a team. For the first assignment the students were instructed to create an infographic on any topic they wanted–the idea was just to get accustomed to using piktochart. The results exceeded my expectations as quite a few students created awesome informative infographics!

Here’s a selection of 12 that stood out as good examples of student work and may be relevant to a wider audience.

All of these infographics were created by students in Prof. Johnson’s Social Media Innovation course taught at Temple U. Fox School of Business in Fall, 2012.

Collaborative Filtering Voting Activity (a la pagerank)

The process is a little bit complicated, but it worked out well. I used Lego-like blocks as a tangible symbol of “voting,” akin to the votes a website receives through in-bound links.

Student returning blocks (credit: Steven L. Johnson)

The high-level process went like this:

• I quickly organized students the 55-60 students into 16 (3-4 person) teams, assigning each team a number.
• The students selected a team Reader, Recorder and Voter(s). I gave the Voters 10 blocks per team.
• The students completed short simple task with an outcome that could be readily assessed by other teams (in this case, asking students to develop a 5-7 word tagline for our class).
• They then went through two rounds of voting for the best tagline. The Voters roamed the room talking with Readers. Voters handed out 1 or more blocks to the team of their choice. The Recorder noted the team number the blocks were received from.
• Round 1
  • In the first round every block counted equally: as one vote.
  • At the end of the round each Recorder announced their vote total. I entered these into a spreadsheet that the class could see. I rank ordered the teams by total votes and then assigned each team a weight of 1 to 5 based on that rank (with a 5 point weighting for the most popular and 1 point for the least).
  • The Recorders then turned over their team’s blocks to the Voter for Round 2. (One team received zero votes in Round 1: I gave them a block to use for Round 2.)
• Round 2
  • In the second round the value of a block varied depending on the weight for the team that gave it.
  • Voters, Readers, and Recorders repeated the voting process.
  • At the end of the round, Recorders calculated the weighted total for their teams votes.
  • We did another roll call, identified the winning team and did a debrief.

Learning Outcomes

This exercise is not intended to teach students the Pagerank algorithm! Instead, it helps students understand the managerial implications of the algorithm for marketing a website.

• Students learn that in-bound links, not out-bound ones, determine pagerank.
• Students learn that not all in-bound links are the same–some count more than others.
• Students observed there is more to a high rank than good content (in this case, a course tagline). Additional factors play into relatively popularity. Most noticeably in this case, the group physically situated in the middle of the back of the room was hard to get to and, unsurprisingly, finished with the lowest vote totals.

Potential Variations

• For a smaller class, I might try a third round of voting or repeat the exercise with a small variation (either a new task or some voting limitations).
• If I had fewer teams I would also provide fewer blocks to vote with.
• Instead of re-using the blocks from Round 1 as the number of Round 2 votes, a more realistic scenario is to hand out a second set of blocks so everyone has equal votes.
• Also, rather than determining the winner solely based on the Round 2 totals, I would probably add together scores from Round 1 and Round 2.

Summary

I am a big believer in the use of in-class activities to promote learning. Activating multiple pathways–both physical and intellectual–reinforces both learning and recall of key concepts.

Do you have any favorite in-class exercises for under-graduate or master’s students?

They’ve done a great job writing short introductions of over a dozen popular social media sites. If you’ve only got time to read a few, here’s the best place to start:

• Introduction to Foursquare (by Chase, Kucher, and Lewis)
• What is SCVNGR? (by Stienmetz and J. Kim)
• Introducing Pinterest (by Fashazn Group; Chan, Nguyen, and S. Kim)
• Get Your Professional Life Going with LinkedIn (by Forlano, Walker, and Frey)
• Hit CouchSurfing (by Cranmer, O’Clair, and Ali)

And, here’s the rest of the summaries…

• Classmates (by Malak, Minich, and Unera)
• Facebook  (by Zhong, Huang , and Zhao)
• Flipboard (by Spanial and Palko)
• Foursquare (by Megan S., James G., and Amanda A.)
• Foursquare (by Garvey, Ezeugwu, and Elsey)
• Power of Google (by Ghazwani, Abedin, and Condello)
• Google Plus (by Bodner, Patel, Swenson)
• Instagram (by Rana, Anderson, and Pandya)
• LinkedIn (by Steigerwald and Do)
• LinkedIn (by So and Koyanagi)
• Pinterest (by team winning: Choo and Pagan)
• SoundCloud (by Hunt, Dawkins, and Poulin)
• Spotify (by Dailey and Tracy)
• Youtube (by Stern, Markman, and Agbo)
• Youtube (by Ilya, Alexa, and Olsian)
• Youtube – International (by Lin, Parmar, and Tang)

Which is your favorite?

You can experience her talk second-hand through the live tweets.

Top 5 Most Viewed Blogs

1. Dubai City of Gold by Salman Ghazwani
2. The JTV Musical Channel by James Tang
3. PhD Dad by Jason Stienmetz
4. Life on the Low by Courtney Minich
5. Philly Phở Joints! by Morsalin Abedin

Top 5 Most Viewed Posts

1. Pepsi or Coca-Cola? by Elizabeth Dawkins
2. What does Facebook know about you? What will it share or sell? by Jason Stienmetz
3. Who is Your Target to Deliver a Message? by Kazuhiko Koyanagi
4. Is Google Making us Stupid? by Ravi S. Patel
5. Favorite Trucks/huts/carts to eat at Temple? by Justin Lewis

Honorable Mention

The first, second, and fifth posts above were also in the top 5 most commented posts, joined by these two discussion questions:

• What is one piece of advice you wish someone told you 5 years ago? by Greg Swenson
• Is Facebook too dangerous for children under 13? by Michael Frey

Check out the links and join me in congratulating the authors!

I’ve already found two potentially life-changing benefits:

1. To get down to zero inbox, I had to break the habit of using my email inbox as my primary to do list.

I’ve been making extensive use of Google filters and folders to shuttle off routine emails. The main reason emails hung out for months (or years) in my Inbox was because I wanted to remember to do something. But, really, isn’t that what a to do list is for?

2. To keep a zero inbox, I am highly motivated to respond to emails immediately. I feel a much greater sense of urgency to get a quick fast response completed, which is 99% of the time all an email needs.

Image: Inbox Zero for my Gmail by BryanAlexander

Gamification, the application of principles from games to make an activity more enjoyable, is a popular feature of mobile health applications (mHealth).

Professionally, the last three semesters I have applied gamification to the teaching of social media innovation. I also have an ongoing research project on gamification and mHealth.

Personally, I have benefited from the gamification to mHealth to develop, reinforce, and maintain healthier habits.

Lessons learned on gamification and mHealth

1. Measuring an activity changes it.

Recent research has shown that keeping a food journal helps people lose weight. Since joining Weight Watcher’s for Men, I keep a daily log of what I eat. By tracking what I eat, it reinforces making better decisions about what, how much, and when to eat.

• I am now eating more fruits and vegetables than I ever have before,
• I have a re-calibrated sense of reasonable serving sizes,  and
• I am less prone to eating due to boredom or in response to stress.

2. Technology helps

The otherwise onerous task of keeping a food journal is greatly simplified through Weight Watcher’s online and mobile tools. Unlike a paper log that is easily misplaced or forgotten, the Weight Watcher’s application make it simple to enter foods and beverages. There are multiple technology in play:

• Weight Watcher points: instead of tracking calories, Weight Watcher’s has a proprietary point system based on a food’s nutritional value,
• Web and mobile applications to enter points, and
• There’s even a smart phone scanner application that will find food information based off of bar codes.

Losing weight involves changing both diet and exercise habits.

I found a great gadget that helps: the fitbit, an electronic pedometer. I keep it in my pocket all day long and it keeps truck of how many steps I take and how many flights of stairs I climb. Without an automated data collection device, I would have never maintained the same vigilence in tracking daily activity.

3. Family and friends help even more

A big reason why I joined Weight Watcher’s is that mom, a retired nutritionist, was having success with it. I find the social support of someone to share pointers, successes, and setbacks helps sustain long-term change. It’s easier to change your habits when those around you support the new behaviors.

Likewise, one of the reasons I bought a fitbit is because I knew someone else who already had one. I now have a half dozen fitbit friends. Through an online fitbit leader board I can see how we’re all doing daily, weekly, and monthly. The friendly competition and shared celebration of milestones provides an extra incentive to carry it with me wherever I go.

4. It’s not just will power

There’s a popular myth that all it takes is strong enough willpower to change a bad behavior and adopt a good one.

Like many myths, it contains a sliver of truth. A strong desire to change is important. But, will power alone is not enough. Even the most inspired and determined artistan needs materials to work with.

Weight watchers provides information to make better eating decisions. In the grocery store, at a restaurant, or preparing a meal in the kitchen it is easier to make better decisions armed with information.

Deciding if I’m going to go for a walk or not, the fitbit helps me stay focused on making daily activity a part of my life.

5. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts

Successful gamification and mHealth takes more than just points, devices, or an easy-to-use mobile application. It’s going to take a complementary system of incentives, nudges, and rewards. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to lose weight or exercise more. I’ve achieved mild success before, but nothing this sustained or dramatic. (I lost 35 pounds in the last 8 months… and I’m not done yet!)

The combination of tools, knowledge, and social support is both challenging and rewarding. The drudgery of exercise is more rewarding when I see visible progress. Instead of being frustrated by changing what I eat, it is now an enjoyable challenge to remain within my allotted points each week.

And, really, that’s the great potential for gamification and mHealth, turning healthy living from something we should do into something we enjoy doing.

With a $16 billion IPO behind it and its billionth user on the horizon, Facebook has made it hard to imagine a world without it. Yet the technology industry is notorious for booms and busts. Can you remember the last time you fired up a Netscape browser, visited a GeoCities website, or invited a friend to join AOL Instant Messenger? I’m convinced that Facebook is as doomed to fail as those ventures.

To remain vibrant and relevant, Facebook must overcome daunting challenges. Unless it can deftly incorporate future waves of innovation, it faces the fate of other once-successful technology companies: death.

Listen closely and you can hear the death knell: Facebook is no longer cool; the once-clean interface is cluttered; and better applications are taking off even faster than Facebook did.

Already, Facebook is in danger of being really good at something people are no longer interested in: sharing content with their acquaintances. And with around 85 percent of its revenue coming from advertising, it lives or dies by its number of users. Moreover, the larger it becomes, the more difficulty it will have adapting to the technological advances and user expectations of tomorrow.

For example, Facebook was once a top destination for photo-sharing. However, as consumers shift to taking photos with smartphones instead of digital cameras, the network’s photo-sharing experience is beginning to feel dated and tired. The company acquired the photo-sharing service Instagram to address that issue, but it now faces the daunting task of integrating the services.

In addition, many people already find Facebook too complicated. Adding features has made this problem worse, not better.

Facebook’s ability to improve the user experience is also limited by its fundamentally flawed model of social interaction, which is based on the idea that every individual has a single social identity. This may have been true for the college students who were its first users, but it does not account for the multiple roles of adults in work, community, and family life. As a college professor, I interact with my students one way and with my colleagues, friends, relatives, and neighbors in others.

Another flaw in Facebook’s presentation of social relationships is that until recently, it required all social connections to be reciprocal. That is, you can view my updates only if I agree to see yours. While the addition of Facebook “followers” acknowledges this limitation of Facebook “friends,” it further confuses an already cluttered user experience.

As the best-known social-networking site, Facebook is also a primary target of both abusive practices and backlash. It seems as if each new feature — most recently, timelines and frictionless sharing — renews privacy concerns. Some employers are now asking job applicants to share their private information on Facebook, making a long history of usage a potential liability instead of an asset.

With declining benefits and increasing risks, users are more likely to leave. This is a deadly result for a company in a mature market.

Five years ago, few of us were using Facebook. Five years from now, that will likely be true again. The future of social media will combine people we know (our social networks), the topics we are interested in (interest networks), and where we are (location-based services), all optimized for smartphones, tablets, and other mobile technology. Facebook is a dominant social-networking platform, but it barely competes in these other categories.

Users flock to the services that provide the most compelling experience; advertisers and brands follow. As users move to new options, a downward spiral into irrelevance can happen virtually overnight. The technology graveyard is full of former market leaders like Netscape, Geocities, and AOL, all of which failed to provide the next big thing. The odds are that Facebook will, too.

Steven L. Johnson is an assistant professor of management information systems at Temple University’s Fox School of Business, where he teaches social-media innovation. His website is http://stevenljohnson.org.

What’s your take? Do you expect to use Facebook as much in 5 years as you do today?

Image credit: dislike button by Sean MacEntee

Gamification in Higher Education

Is it possible to use gamification to motivate students above and beyond grades?

These students in my class certainly think so:

“The Quest was an amazing experience. Being able to score myself really helped me stay competitive with my site and made me do things now as opposed to later because I feared losing my rank.”

“I thought this was a great idea on Professor Johnson’s end, mainly because it was a friendly competitive challenge, and really engaged everyone to take part in it. Personally, I struggled in the beginning to keep up with other students, but since I had quite a few posts I was able to get myself on the leaderboard most of the time. There was definitely a peak in the middle of the semester where I really focused on posts and activities. Even though I never made it to the top, I was happy I made it to the leaderboards. Overall I thought that it was a great idea, and I have also noted the experience with other teachers to maybe incorporate it with other classes.”

“The Quest helped to motivate projects outside of the classroom. Quest points absolutely made me do projects in a timely matter so that I did not look like a slacker in front of the class. I thought it was a great idea to announce winners this let students know if they were slacking. Originally when the Quest started I was not ranked my goal starting out in the class was to make the leader board. By the end I was ranked [in top third]. The Quest without a doubt motivated me more to do more projects.”

“Participating in the Quest, what I learned was that you have to be dedicated and be active for your blog to be successful. In order to be on the Quest leader board, you had to be active and keep up with the activities given. During the first couple weeks I was on the leader board. However, after slowing down my activity on my blog, I was no longer on the leader board and was not on it since. The professor said that although being on the leader board does not equal an A for the course, people who are on the leader board generally do better in the class. I can see how this would hold true because being constantly active is one part of what makes a good blog. I believe that not being on the leader board directly correlated with the amount of effort that I put into the activities at that time. If I had kept with the activities as they were given and stayed on the leader board, then I could have had a better blog overall. “

“The Quest” leaderboard is a great idea for operating a class. Even though there’s no grading benefit to participating, it served as a great checklist for logging which social media activities each user completed. … Additionally, human beings are born with a competitive nature, so even though there’s no tangible reward for participating in “The Quest”, students still have a desire to compete to be the best among their peers. … Going over the leaderboard at the end of class in front of everyone also helps motivate students to participate. People love attention so this is a great opportunity to get noticed in front of a large audience. “

(All quotes from end of semester reports by students in Spring, 2012 section of MIS3538: Social Media Innovation.)

Social Media Innovation Quest

I recently completed my third semester teaching Temple University’s Fox School of Business MIS3538: Social Media Innovation course with the Social Media Innovation Quest as a gamification element.

I developed The Quest in order to encourage self-paced learning through a series of required and self-selected activities that got progressively more difficult. Through a combination of the WordPress Achievements plug-in and Google Forms, students:

• Earn points and badges,
• View their standing on a leader board, and
• Receive weekly recognition for “leveling-up”.

As the student feedback attests, well designed gamification can work in a college class room. In the rest of this blog post I’ll lay out the major elements of The Quest along with why I think they work.

Introducing the Quest

The Quest starts at the beginning of the semester, with points accruing to students with activities beginning on the first day of class. In the course syllabus, it is introduced as follows:

To help motivate students to maximize learning opportunities in this course, we also run a Social Media Innovation Quest (hereafter, The Quest). This is a “scoring” system that awards Quest Points (QPs), badges, and levels for class-related achievements. Students who gain sufficient QPs will be promoted to higher Quest levels and will rise to the top of the leaderboard!

Quest points, badges, levels, and the leaderboard are for fun!

Lots of Quest Points, numerous badges, a high level, and the top spot on the leaderboard are no guarantee of a high course grade. Nonetheless, past experience shows that the number of QPs earned and strong course performance usually goes hand-in-hand. Therefore, during the semester your QPs do provide one assessment, albeit imperfect, of your course performance to date.

The class instructor solely determines your grade based on completed work, assignment requirements, and grading criteria. Pay attention to the formal assignment requirements as posted on the Course Instructor Blog and expectations stated on the blog and in the course.

The building block for the quest is Quest Points. There are primarily earned by completing activities that are also reflected in a student’s participation grade (20% of final grade) or the major individual assignment grade (40% of final grade).

The Mechanics

The Achievements plug-in automatically keeps track of how many posts and comments students make on the Course Participation Hub blog (all 45 students had authoring privileges at the blog). I set it up so that students earn points (and badges) for their first three posts and for pre-set levels of comments (e.g., 1st, 5th, 10th, 20th, and on up to 100th). To keep things interesting, the comment levels are not entirely predictable and some of the achievements are even hidden until earned.

There are many ways that students can earn points (and badges). Every couple of weeks during the semester I release more activities. Once a student completed an activity, they enter it at the Activity Submission Form. I review submitted activities multiple times a week and either (a) grant the achievement or (b) provide feedback on what still needs to be done.

(If I had an unlimited budget for enhancing my “courseware,” I would create a system to release new activities individually based on which activities had already been completed. Also, I would have some way to have all achievements machine-graded in order to provide immediate feedback. If anyone wants to fund such an effort, please contact me!)

Leaderboards and Leveling-Up

On the course website there is a leaderboard showing the very top performing students (Top 10 out of 45). Compared to a typical course where the highest performing students have little motivation to achieve beyond an “A” level, the Top 10 leaderboard provides constant reinforcement to highly motivated students to go well beyond the course requirements.

The leaderboard promoted at the end of every (weekly) class meeting serves a different purpose. It does not show point totals, instead it shows a much larger number of students grouped by level. The cut-off for making this leaderboard tracked the pace for “meeting course expectations” (roughly a B grade).

Also, instead of implicitly rewarding only the top performers, everyone who made significant efforts that week is recognizing for “leveling-up” to a new performance band. This provides motivation not just for the very top performing students, but important feedback for everyone in the course.

Why does it work?

I’ll leave the final word to my students:

I find this system very useful because it served as a strong motivator for me to stay not only on top of the material, but also to be on the leader board. As a student who consistently appeared on the leader board through the whole semester, I must acknowledge that the level of satisfaction I gained each time I moved a level up, strongly influenced my course performance and the amount of effort I put into completion of all activities.

I would say that The Quest is important because of the way it ties everything together and incentivizes getting your work done. On top of that, it motivates some students to go above and beyond, which enriches the class experience for the rest of us. Over the course of the semester, the participation hub got better and better with comments and people replying to comments. Even though it was for a grade, you can’t just make up stuff in the comments – you have to put some thought into what you’re saying (I may have put too much thought into mine, but I felt good after I gave my opinions on things which I felt were well explained).

The Quest Leader board was the best aspect of the social media class. Having a friendly competitive atmosphere that motivated all of us to learn as much as we could about social media was awesome. There were some activities within the leadership board that I wish we received a tutorial on first but I guess the best way to learn something new is to actually try it out and fail a couple of times.

MIS3538: Social Media Innovation is an upper-level elective offered by the Management Information Systems Department in the Fox School of Business.