Summer 2013 – Page 3 – Seidenberg School News

From Pace’s Opportunitas: Quadcopters

Pace’s Opportunitas page recently featured Seidenberg grad Keith McPherson, class of ’13, and Seidenberg Professor Rick Kline, PhD, who set out to build their own quadcopter drone. Through their experience building the hardware and software of the drone, they discovered plausible uses for drones, including commercial and journalistic purposes (though many types of commercial use are still illegal in the States).

Follow the link to read the article featured on Pace’s Opportunitas page:

http://opportunitas.blogs.pace.edu/2013/05/cleared-for-landing/

Seidenberg Professor James Gabberty Writes about Congress and Cybersecurity for ‘The Hill’

“In reality there is no one ‘best way’ to defend against cyber attacks because the path towards safe computing practices that could thwart attacks has been lengthy, evolving and unclear.” Read more

How should congress approach cybersecurity? And how do agencies like the FTC choose which corporations to attack when cybersecurity falters, especially when there are so few solid legal codes in place? Another of Prof. James Gabberty’s articles on the topic has been published on “The Hill’s” Congress blog; this article specifically discusses the FTC’s lawsuit against Wyndham and the resulting call to policy scrutiny. Gabberty continually publishes articles for “The Hill” and is an active part of the conversation that surrounds congress’ role in cybersecurity. His article from February, available here, also considers politics and information security.

@thehill on Twitter | TheHill on Facebook

This Weekend’s STEM Conference at Pace Featured Exceptional Guests to Discuss Technology’s Role in Education

We just had an eventful and exciting weekend here at Seidenberg! The much anticipated two-day STEM conference has now come and gone, but in its wake remains many new things to discuss, mobile apps to use, plants to tend to, and ZOOBs to play with.

Pictures from the STEM Conference — Pictured clockwise from top, Douglas Rushkoff speaks to the attendees about technology and education; Seidenberg students run final checks on their mobile apps before presenting them to the crowd; Rushkoff and Jonathan Hill have a discussion during Friday’s luncheon; Teachers, professors, and other attendees enjoy food and drinks at Friday’s rooftop mixer.

The two-day event consisted of a VIP luncheon, an evening mixer, and a collaboratory conference. The main topics discussed included technology’s role in educational settings, the importance of approaching technology critically, and how computing should be interdisciplinary but also stand as a full, separate subject.

Our keynote speaker was PhD Media Theorist, Author, and Codecademy’s Evangelist, Douglas Rushkoff. Well-spoken, energetic, and clearly passionate about the day’s topic, Rushkoff had a lot to say about the relationship between technology and education from its past to its trajectory. A main point in his discussion was how programming should be approached as literacy. Students should be as well-rounded in computing as they are expected to be in other subjects. As he mentions in his book Program or Be Programmed, it is not okay to be a mere passenger in the technological world; students should be focused on learning less about basic skills in user-oriented program packages, such as Microsoft Office, and more about the programming skills that give us those packages in the first place. Rushkoff stated that he prefers to approach computing as a liberal art and a science–a type of engineering that he likened to cooking. Cooking is hugely scientific. The chemistry of the elements and how they blend is essential to the task yet cooking can be creative and artful and requires the capacity to multitask as well.

Rushkoff is also a big advocate for experiential education, as described by a mantra, “see one, do one, teach one,” which is part of Codecademy’s teaching process.

When Rushkoff asked the audience for feedback, many of the teachers in the crowd (not all of whom come from a computing or STEM subject) agreed with his stance on the matter. The questions that arose were those of what to do next. One teacher asked how to find a suitable entry point when teaching computing, to which Rushkoff responded that questioning, comparison, and critique are the first steps of learning. To begin, students must approach programming as a liberal art, then they may delve deeper into technical learning.

With that much said, Rushkoff bid the conference farewell and Michael Joaquin Grey, an artist and inventor, stepped up to show everyone his invention: ZOOBs. Disguised as a toy for kids, like Legos or Tinkertoys, ZOOBs are building blocks for all kinds of structures. The unique thing about them is that they are modeled after anatomical and naturally occurring joints and connectors, so the structures that form are mobile and can be close to actual anatomies. Grey presented to the audience a model of a DNA helix that was flexible. From that model, one could see how the DNA can wrap up into different shapes, as it does in living cells. There are five different pieces, which are five different colors, just as there are five vowels, five fingers, five base pairs, five joints. ‘ZOOB’ itself is an acronym for Zoology, Ontology, Ontogeny, and Botany. Grey is now working on projects related to sensory integration issues and computational cinema.

After everyone got their share of playtime with the all-too-addictive ZOOBs, students, professors, and teachers who have been working on their own mobile apps presented their respective programs to the rest of the group. Each app was one geared towards educating and could eventually be used in a classroom setting. The apps, created from scratch, ranged from chemistry rummy to an app for measurements in biology to an app that hosts a virtual patient.

To open back up to the topic of the day, there was a panel discussion that continued off of Douglas Rushkoff’s conversation. The panel featured Steve Ettlinger, author of Twinkie, Deconstructed, Brian Evans and Tom Lynch, both of whom are professors in the School of Education here at Pace, Lou Lahana, a teacher at The Island School, and PhD Meghan Groome, the Executive Director of Education & Public Programs at New York Academy of Science. The moderator was Ben Esner, Director of K-12 STEM Education at Polytechnic Institute at New York University. The discussion flowed through the vision for STEM Education, to techniques and examples in curricula, to publicizing it all to generate a larger discussion across the globe. Audience members were also able to add their two-cents when the time came. One teacher in particular expressed her views that teachers in Pace as well as teachers in any other institute should be able to access curated advice on technology, since no one will have to time to keep up with technology as new devices appear while obtaining the necessary skill levels to teach with each new device. Instead, this teacher hoped that a forum would open up either online or in the form of an association that will produce reputable advice on which technologies are the best in a classroom environment and when it is necessary to update.

“Are Social Media and Community Management the Same Thing?” –What We Learned from the AOL Social Media Salon

In case you missed out on the AOL Social Media Salon at AOL’s Headquarters on 770 Broadway on May 21st, we’re here for you. Seidenberg had a group of enthusiastic attendees, pictured above, and here you’ll find out the most interesting bits of the night including the helpful information that the panel of guests had to offer.

Our host, Matthew Knell, AOL’s social media director and a graduate of Pace’s School of CSIS (class of 2000), presented for us the panel:

The Panel from AOLSocialMediaSalon

From left to right we have Katie Morse, the social marketing manager at Billboard, Matthew Knell himself, Devin Desjarlais, the social media director at Omaze, Tim McDonald, the community manager at HuffPost Live, and Meg Peters, the community director at Mashable.

The event was held as part of Internet Week New York (#iwny), a festival devoted to exploration of how business, technology, and culture intersect. The goal of this event in particular was to clarify the differences between Social Media and Community Management. After singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Devin Desjarlais, the panel tackled the initial question of “Are social media and community management the same thing?” The overall response was a resounding ‘no,’ the two are not equivalent or interchangeable, but work together, as Devin put it, “like best friends.” The differences were described in terms of proactivity and reactivity. Social Media gets the message out, and Community Management draws people in.

With that said, the panel then discussed how their work is organized around Social Media and Community Management, and whether there is a distinct line of division between the two fronts or if that line is undetectable. They all agreed that there was no distinguishing line, and Meg Peters added that the end goal for both Social Media and Community Management is to allow the readers’ voices to be heard. The readers offer important criticism and advice and it is always important to listen to those comments in order to best improve the readers’ experience.
When the panel was asked about brands’ access to their audiences, it was clear that there usually is a line. Katie Morse said she is “like the gate-keeper.” She will allow sponsored tweets but there is a maximum amount per week and the tweets must always coincide with what Billboard envisions and wants. They use benchmarks to track the success of sponsored tweets in relation to Billboard.

So then, can a Social Media channel have a community? Most of the panel answered ‘yes,’ stating that the channels allow people to connect to one another, generating a community of sorts via threads. Tim McDonald answered ‘no,’ and clarified that “community is community,” and that social media is a way of accessing that community rather than generating it.

The panel then talked about how they measure the success of their Social Media and Community Management forces. Tim claimed to not focus on hard numbers to measure success and instead worry about increasing productivity while overall figuring out how to gain easy access to the information of willing participants. Meg and Katie both shared that they were inclined to use metric data to measure the success of their initiatives, but were mostly concerned with the engagement of their audiences.

For anyone involved in business, Social Media and Community Management are unavoidable in this day in age. Not even are they just unavoidable, but they are crucial as a business stimulus (or detriment, if handled poorly). Students of Seidenberg (and even Lubin and Dyson) are encouraged to hone their skills in managing community affairs and social media forces.

A few students from Seidenberg were able to reserve a spot at the event. Julie Gauthier, a rising junior, Computer Science major, says she learned a lot about large business management via social media. She states “It’s closely tied into marketing, but it’s a far more interpersonal relationship with a fanbase, or a variety of fan-bases.” She also claimed that the information is directly relatable to her position as a digital marketer for a small company in Connecticut. Another student, Sabiya Bacchus, also a rising junior, Computer Science major, after attending the panel discussion, learned that “it’s imperative to understand your target audience/readers, because only then can you maximize their experience, which will inevitably help you achieve your goal (whatever it may be).”

After taking all this new information in, we (the bloggers, social media controllers, and community managers in Seidenberg) have started to wonder about other branches that may be less obvious forms of community management. For example, the Student Government Association. Are positions within SGA considered to be Community Management positions? If so, how are these officers using Social Media to amplify their information to the right audiences? Not only SGA, but how are clubs, greek houses, or any other groups keen on keeping a specific group of students involved, informed, and engaged using technology to their advantage?

As a side note, other tips for Social Media channels include:
– Be aware of the fine balance between entertaining posts and posts that advertise.
– People will tune out repetitive posts; keep your feed interesting and lively.
– Do not buy likes (companies will try to sell 10,000 likes/followers for $500, for example). They are neither genuine nor interactive, and when the number of followers/likes of a page does not correspond with the likes of popular posts, those numbers will reflect poorly on the brand/company/group.