I’m talking about intellectual diversity: the ways in which MCDM students and faculty approach and solve problems, skills and abilities applied in novel and meaningful ways, and outcomes that far exceed my admittedly high expectations. The student work from Fall 2011′s COM 546 Foundations course - Narratives & Networks in Digital Media – exemplifies both the challenges and the opportunities that true diversity can provide.

Course Background

As a foundational course to the MCDM program, Narratives & Networks in Digital Media had the unique position of orienting Cohort 11 students both to the theory and also the application of many elements they will encounter in the program. Taking a bit of their own advice, this course was newly revamped for 2011, and co-taught by MCDM Director Hanson Hosein and Dr. Malcolm Parks. The result for this first incarnation? Engaging discussions, relevant lectures and guest-speakers, and tangible takeaways for professionals and creatives, alike.

Students in this course witnessed the rise of the Occupy movement, the start of the upcoming nomination and election season, and the death of Steve Jobs. Meanwhile, they engaged with new tools and platforms, tried valiantly to “publish then filter,” and were brought together in new and sometimes challenging ways. Students were exposed to basic principles of digital media, and become comfortable with the central tenet of the MCDM: to effect trusted and persuasive communication, professionals need to develop a compelling narrative tied to strategic network engagement.

With this post, we would like to share some of their work, some of the process, and some of the core philosophies of the MCDM program.

Binaries

Human beings are wired for a binary world – but not the digital binary of 0s and 1s. Rather, as humans move through their world, they inherently seek out and identify similarities and differences with the people, places, and ideas they encounter. This identification process helps us to navigate the tricky waters of modern existence by leveraging our past experiences. While this process has become an evolutionary necessity, it can also keep us from broadening our horizons and hinder our development.

In the wild – or the wilds of the workplace – being able to quickly identify something, reference it against our experience, and decide a course of action is a matter of survival. In the classroom, however, facing these tensions head-on can mean the difference between going through the motions or finding a breakthrough moment. This course was designed to leverage this human tendency to both expose students to new views on topics they were familiar with while simultaneously including topics and tools they hadn’t seen before.

As with much of the MCDM, students were given a chance to apply these new experiences in both individual and group settings.

Go Team!

In this course, students were allowed to choose a topic that resonated with them for the individual assignments. This resulted in people pursuing topics they were passionate about – but left the instructional team with a significant challenge when it came to group work: How to go about creating groups that will have enough tension to thoroughly explore an issue, but retain enough cohesion to complete the assignment?

Group work is rarely easy – yet it has become a fixture of our modern lives. This “team” mentality abounds at the workplace and at home, but despite its prevalence, the challenges remain. Learning to work together – especially when there are significant differences amongst group members – is essential. These classroom experiences offer students a chance to take risks in the name of education, where the consequences are minimized and the feedback and engagement is maximized. They are actively encouraged to try things outside of their comfort zone, both individually and in groups.

The only caveat: if you fail, fail forward.

Applied Examination

For the group assignment, students were tasked with creating:

[a] ten-minute class group presentation that gets to the heart of your story strategy, and how you engaged networked community to spread the word. This presentation should ideally incorporate a short, sharable piece of multimedia content (visual or audible) that can serve as a demonstrable artifact for your overall project. You’ll also include examples from your blogs, strategy papers, and class content. You’ll be subject to a 10-20 minute class Q&A and discussion.

Not only would students need to address their own individual applications of the principles of digital media, but they would have to create a set of packaged, compelling, cross-project narratives exploring these issues more deeply. This is truly a difficult challenge, requiring students bring to bear not only the tools and techniques they had been exposed to over the course of the quarter, but also their own experiences, talents, and skills to approach this multi-faceted problem.

Group Selection

The formation of class groups is always a challenge for the instructor. On the one hand, do you simply let the students choose their own group, and let them live with their own choices? Or, should group selection be seen as a chance to encourage students to engage with new viewpoints, individuals, and challenges that they may not choose for themselves?

In this case, I was tasked with forming the groups. Each student had submitted a one paragraph description of their Action Idea – the central narrative thread the compels both their strategy and their content. I had a good sense of who each of the 48 students were, how they interacted, and had seen some of their work product.

The real challenge was creating consistent group sizes while knowing that student’s individual topics were set. On top of that, I wanted to create opportunities for students to work with some new ideas and new peers – i.e. not the people they sat next to every week in class. Diversity amongst group members – again, talking about intellectual diversity as well – was key. Instead of creating a group that would essentially say the same thing four different ways, I worked to form groups whose overarching themes may not be so readily apparent. While I knew that the students were capable, I was pleasantly surprised with the final products.

Outcomes

The “Family” group featured one student sharing her grandmother’s photos, memories, and thoughts on a blog called Upload Your Grandma. Another student was exploring life as a 20-something who had moved back home after college.  Yet others found themselves facing challenges as a modern-day father, a mother to her children and caretaker to her parents, and one living in “the real modern family.” These individual narratives combined to paint a very compelling picture of what it means to be a part of a family today.

Featuring one blog about eating gluten-free in Seattle, one about learning to cook, one featuring the MilkBread Monster, and one about bees, the “Conscientious Consumption” team put together a great take on what, how, and why we eat – or don’t – in America today:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another group of students combined nature, boxing, robots, and collaboration to help expose kids to leadership opportunities:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yet another group leveraged their diverse backgrounds and topics to tackle Taboo Conversations:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Moving Forward

Through a combination of theory and practice, familiar and new, individual and collective, MCDM students find new and exciting ways to see their world, tell the stories they find compelling, and build and grow the communities that will make a difference for us all. Just as our students continue to grow and evolve, so does the program. If you have any questions about the MCDM program, please don’t hesitate to reach out  by email, on Twitter, on Facebook, or by phone at (206)-543-6745.

Related Posts

• April 21, 2011 -- Greg Mortenson and Leadership Narrative Lies (12)
• December 20, 2011 -- The Power of People and Story (1)
• June 20, 2011 -- Graduating MCDM: Another Milepost on the Journey (1)
• April 13, 2011 -- Make The Change (1)
• September 21, 2010 -- Going Epic regarding the Future We Make (4)

At the Great Wall (Badaling Section)

Thousands of people flooded around me. I stared in exasperation at the sign. Yet, I knew that it had to be emblematic of something about my week-long trip to Beijing — my first to China. True to my personality, I had tried to go against the tide by trying to enter the Forbidden City from the less popular north gate. But as of July 2^nd, the sign informed me, visitors to the very much once “forbidden” home of the Emperor of China, had to enter from the south, and leave by the north.

I had been happily using my Garmin GPS watch to track my weekend pedestrian expedition in Beijing.

But the thought of trudging back to the south end, only to end up back where I was presently, and then have to do it all over again to get to the subway seemed like many steps too far.

So what did I do? I skipped visiting the Forbidden City – a treasured UNESCO site – altogether. Rather I content myself with a deep hangout at Beihar Park, and then Tiananmen Square. And I spent all day using stodgy Internet connections through Beijing to download a rental of the Academy Award-winning “The Last Emperor” from iTunes for my return flight to Seattle. Bertolucci’s famed exclusive access to the Forbidden City for his film would have to suffice.

My walk through Beijing

After all, I had accomplished what I had set out to do: to get a glimpse of China for the first time, especially from a digital media perspective. My vehicle in was as a participant in transmitCHINA, where I hobnobbed with entrepreneurial digerati from both the Middle Kingdom and the New World.

Even better, the event was held at a resort by the Great Wall of China. This afforded me two opportunities:

My walk along the Great Wall of China

(1) I got to walk along a secluded, non-touristy part of the Wall. Once again with Garmin GPS breadcrumbs to show off to the folks back home. I was actually surprised to get accurate tracking, I had expected that the signal would somehow get scrambled by the Chinese government.

(2) To experience the Great Firewall of China firsthand. No Facebook, no Twitter, no YouTube (some conference participants agreed with my hypothesis that this was partly for political reasons, partly to shelter homegrown Chinese platforms from global competition). Thirty thousand government employees sit and monitor for the use of the “three T’s” – Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen. I even searched “Great Firewall of China” on both Google and Bing and got hung up indefinitely. Once old China hand explained to me that an attempt to access the wrong kind of site would usually result in a “digital slap on the wrist” from the government – no access to the Web for a few minutes, just so you knew you had done wrong.

Still, I was prepared for government blockage, having signed up for a Virtual Private Network (with VyperVPN) before I left the USA. I was able to divert my computer’s internet connection to IP addresses in the USA (Netflix!!), the UK (BBC iPlayer for Torchwood and Doctor Who!) or the EU and Hong Kong to access Facebook and Twitter to my heart’s content. And I found this Wikipedia entry of the Great Firewall, which also includes a concluding, pithy quote from my brother, Dr. Gus Hosein’s colleague at Privacy International, Simon Davies.

Now I thought I was being sneaky and decidedly a bad guest by using the VPN. But then I saw a few other participants (even locals) also had their own VPN access. So I didn’t feel so bad.

Indeed, I’ve read that the Chinese government tends to go in waves when it comes to clamping down on VPN use (it continues to shore up the Great Firewall with the latest in monitoring technology). It recognizes that unless it’s a particularly sensitive time politically, people do need a release valve for pent up frustrations. Better they do so online than in person at Tiananmen Square (there’s a heavy police presence there, by the way).

At Tiananmen Square

I was told on several occasions that they’re actually afraid of Sina Weibo, the Twitter microblog equivalent. There are 195 million microbloggers in China, which dwarfs Twitter’s worldwide user count. And they use platforms like these to complain about government officials, which can sometimes result in a prompt response.

Tracking the transmitChina Weibo stream

During my short time in China, I came across these stories in the local English-language paper that demonstrate the contradictory, sometimes chaotic nature of the use of digital media:

- An official in Henan province was dismissed after his temper tantrum against a school principal was caught on video and distributed online [link].

- A man had complained for two years on his blog about “mistreatment” at the hands of his doctor. [link] He ended up confronting and stabbing the doctor.

- Yao Chen, the “Queen of the Microblogs” has 11 million followers on Weibo. The B-movie actress is the third most popular microblogger in the world after Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. This summer she posted a story about her mother’s cousin who tried to commit suicide because she had received unfair compensation after her land had been requisitioned. [link]

A fairly literal translation of the Chinese saying

China is a 5,000 year-old civilization that presently feels as if it’s the center of the universe, with the money and youthful presence to back it. I suspect this is what Paris might have felt like in the 1920′s, or London in the 1880′s — both major cities at their magnetic peak.

During my time at transmitCHINA, I made some valuable connections with Asia experts from the University of Oregon and the University of Toronto, which may lead to more serious relationships in the region. I also experienced an innovative roundtable approach, the antidote to the dull as doornails panel presentation method that we eschew at Four Peaks.

During one such session, I had the opportunity to define “disruptive innovation” with a small group of people. When I explained that part of this phenomenon is to find opportunity in chaos, Kaiser Kuo, the head of international PR for Chinese search giant Baidu said, “There’s an ancient Chinese expression for that, ‘in chaos, heroes arise.’”

I was quite taken with this, which led me to spend more time chatting with Kaiser. I quickly found out that in addition to his high profile position (his unofficial title he told me was the “Minister of the Suppression of Barbarian Lies”) he was responsible for the rise of heavy metal to China in the 1990’s with his group Tang Dynasty.

Well he had me there, and we soon discovered that we had a mutual, unhealthy love for the group Rush. Wow, China was turning out to be even cooler than I could have imagined it. As Kaiser and I began our bromance, we met for coffee back in Beijing a few days later (after his lunch with Charlene Li, whose books Groundswell and Open Leadership have both been required reading in my class). One thing led to another, and he invited me to attend a show featuring his AC/DC cover band “Dirty Deeds.”

Kaiser Kuo on bass with Dirty Deeds AC/DC tribute band

Around 150 expats (more than 1% of Beijing’s 16 million residents are foreigners) and some Chinese showed up. The bar’s Internet connection was the fastest I had experienced yet in China (which allowed me to download the rest of “The Last Emperor” to my iPad). I was thinking that this was a pretty free-flowing Western experience when one of the band members pointed out that there was a surveillance camera by the bar with a direct connection back to the local police station.

I recalled my tourist experience at the Forbidden City the previous day. Even as China opens its gates, there are still certain immutable realities when it comes to command and control.

I got one last reminder of this upon my departure as I tried to login to the airport wi-fi. I had to scan my passport into a machine (which registered my name and passport number). Out spat a small receipt that read “According to Ministry of Public Order No. 82 Passengers online should authenticate by real name.” As I would soon discover, it was hardly worth the surrender of my personal information; the slower-than-dialup connection got me nowhere fast–which might be the best description of negotiating China’s confusing digital landscape.

Related Posts

• January 26, 2012 -- The Anatomy of an MCDM Foundation Course (1)
• January 12, 2012 -- Your Phone Was Probably Made in a Sweatshop (5)
• July 21, 2011 -- MCDM Director Featured on Local NBC Affiliate (0)
• June 20, 2011 -- Graduating MCDM: Another Milepost on the Journey (1)
• May 25, 2011 -- Lynn Shelton and Matt Vancil on Media Space Tonight (1)

Related Posts

• January 26, 2012 -- The Anatomy of an MCDM Foundation Course (1)
• September 29, 2011 -- The Digital and the Forbidden: My Trip to Beijing (3)
• June 20, 2011 -- Graduating MCDM: Another Milepost on the Journey (1)
• May 25, 2011 -- Lynn Shelton and Matt Vancil on Media Space Tonight (1)
• April 18, 2011 -- Reverse Innovation: A Two-Way Street to Global Tech Solutions (2)

On June 9, 2011 I did something I didn’t expect to do a few years earlier:

Off the top, though, I have a huge number of people to thank for “holding me up” when I was ready to fall and for joining me on the journey.  The two primary people I want to thank are my spouse and partner, Carol, and Hanson Hosein, director of the MCDM program (pictured here handing me my diploma). My journey would have been impossible without them.

Before applying to the MCDM, I had taken a few management courses and read a bit of what I’ll call “classic” MBA-type literature. I did not getting fired up about it.  Some of the material was illuminating but it didn’t excite me. It seemed very dry to me and didn’t seem to concern people as much as numbers.  Since my passion is helping others, an MBA didn’t seem like the right path, but I couldn’t see another road where I could gain the kinds of understanding and skills I felt I needed while also building upon my passions–both technical and personal.

Taking a survey of the career landscape around me I saw, if you will, thick herds of MBAs everywhere. I had no desire to become one of untold thousands and de-individualize myself (as a balancing statement, I know a number of friends and colleagues who hold MBAs and I hold them in the highest regard….I tjust wasn’t the path for me). Some of the reading I’d done in these areas supplied me with the vocabulary and basic concepts, but the focus was not my focus and the passion, not my passion.

Third, the MBA-type reading that I had done didn’t seem to be taking into account the incredible disruption taking place via social networks and digital media–co-opting it and attempting to fit it into older modes of understanding, yes, but recognizing the opportunities for disruption and new ways of working with and for people–not so much.

A good friend of mine at work was working on his MCDM degree and we spent many lunch hours talking over what he was learning.  His passion and excitement about the future of this line of study was obvious and highly contagious…he frequently referred to it all as “brain candy”!  He invited me to sit in on one of his classes one evening and I took him up on it.  It just happened that Hanson was the instructor for that class on user-generated content, and so we were introduced. During the break he and I chatted and decided to set up a meeting to talk about the direction this program was going and what it might mean for me.

That meeting was my tipping point.  I went home and effused about it to Carol.  After going over costs, both in time and other resources, we decided I should go for it.  The resulting segment of my journey took three years.

This program of study has changed the way that I think about people, about business, about communication, about who I am and what I’m capable of and the interconnectedness of us all.  I have difficulty calling out specific people, classes and colleagues.  It seems to me like trying to remember the portions of the journey when the road was the most steep, the light most bright or the view the most majestic. If pressed into a stream-of-consciousness list of take-aways, I can provide this:

• The central role of storytelling
• Hansen Hosein and his ability to captivate
• Immense amounts of reading
• How to really do research
• Immense amounts of writing
• Critical discussions on the implications of new, open business models and disruption
• Tweeting like fury all the time
• Delightful and engaging classmates
• Kathy Gill
• Learning to love metrics and stop hyper-ventilating about them
• Discovering the joys of creating videos and visual storytelling
• Always something new
• Psychster
• Anita Crofts and leaders
• Finding daily uses for all of this at work
• Did I mention the writing?

The usual question I get asked now is, “So what’s next?”  What’s next is now.  What’s next is this work you’re reading.  What’s next is the video I’m working on.  What’s next is this very next step on my journey, and I’m loving it.

Related Posts

• January 26, 2012 -- The Anatomy of an MCDM Foundation Course (1)
• December 20, 2011 -- The Power of People and Story (1)
• April 13, 2011 -- Make The Change (1)
• January 24, 2011 -- Four Peaks Salon: Transmedia Storytelling and Net Neutrality (5)
• September 21, 2010 -- Going Epic regarding the Future We Make (4)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Undeniably, the two industries that have been most severely disrupted by the digital media revolution are the music and film industries. Tonight’s airing of the latest Media Space television show highlights the work of two local area film disrupters. Matt Vancil and Lynn Shelton might not share a similar common artistic vision in their work but they are both pioneering new ways to fund, distribute and produce motion picture content. Pioneering crowd-source development models for his web series “JourneyQuest” Vancil also delves deep into his storytelling philosophy. Lynn Shelton has garnered both industry accolades and indy-cred for her distinct feature films and work in episodic television.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related Posts

• January 26, 2012 -- The Anatomy of an MCDM Foundation Course (1)
• September 29, 2011 -- The Digital and the Forbidden: My Trip to Beijing (3)
• July 21, 2011 -- MCDM Director Featured on Local NBC Affiliate (0)
• June 20, 2011 -- Graduating MCDM: Another Milepost on the Journey (1)
• April 18, 2011 -- Reverse Innovation: A Two-Way Street to Global Tech Solutions (2)

Rothenberg-Aalami is a coauthor of “Technology at the Margins: How IT Meets the Needs of Emerging Markets,” and was invited to the April edition of the MCDM Four Peaks Salon to discuss the changing nature of the global technology business and the influence of emerging markets on technology providers.

Jessica Rothenberg-Aalami (left) with moderator Anita Verna Crofts, MCDM Associate Director.

The salon, moderated by associate director Anita Verna Crofts, discussed the concept of technology and innovation in emerging markets. The idea Jessica Rothenberg-Aalami brings up is that when emerging markets gain access to technology, they create and innovate solutions that are relevant to their needs. But the application and relevance of these solutions and innovations are not limited to the emerging markets where they originated. Increasingly, their ideas and technologies can find niches and fill needs in the developed markets as well.

“I’m excited by “reverse innovation” because it recognizes parallels that countries share – populations that have limited access to services – and in doing so, promotes a more equitable vision of world, as opposed to the categorization that terms such as ‘emerging markets’ underscore,” Crofts said to Flip The Media after the Four Peaks conversation. Crofts teaches several courses in the MCDM that deal with the global opportunities and challenges regarding technology and communications.

Thursday’s Four Peak Salon opened with a live webcast of the Media Space TV episode “Innovation and Community in Emerging Markets: Social Tools for Social Change” on UWTV where MCDM program Director Hanson Hosein interviewed Jessica Rothenberg-Aalami about her take on technology at the margins – how there is profit to be made in emerging markets on solutions that can serve their needs. Furthermore, if these technologies and innovations can be imported back to the developed world – that is a win-win situation. The Media Space TV episode will be broadcasted at 9pm on April 27, 2011.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rothenberg-Aalami is a managing partner with the global organization Gobee Group – the name sprung out of the purpose of the team: to go between at sites of need and bridge the gap by partnering with organizations and donors that can work with the emerging markets.

“It’s going beyond charity,” Rothenberg-Aalami said, adding that it is not a quick process and that is where Gobee comes in.

“Collaborative organization takes a long time. Working with anthropologists, tech people, researcher, super-national organizations and local groups in academics – they all speak their own language. At the end of the day, very few of these are still collaborating. So there is a need for translators to help bridge those gaps and focus on the needs and problems you are trying to solve,” Rothenberg-Aalami explained.

Health, education, agriculture and money

Currently, Rothenberg-Aalami sees the biggest opportunities for innovation and technology solutions in emerging markets happening in the health care and educational segments, as well as banking services in areas where no banking exists or where most people don’t have bank accounts. Nokia pioneered this service a couple of years ago with Nokia Money. They just launched their pilot in India this year, partnering with Obopay and Yes Bank. It lets people add money to their SIM cards and then transfer money to recipients via text messaging.

Rothenberg-Aalami brought up an example from Uganda where Google partnered with MTN and Grameen Foundation AppLab to produce a mobile suite providing five different mobile apps related to farming, weather forecasts and health. Users could access real-time information from Google SMS search via text messaging. For instance, a farmer could text a crops-related question to the agricultural database and would get the answer sent to his cell phone as a text message. A mother could text a health inquiry to the health topics database, and would get a prompt answer back on her cell phone. Rothenberg-Aalami explained that this service was free for a period of time, and usage soared. But when the service providers wanted to monetize the service, usage plummeted.

“Access and free exchange of information are still huge issues,” Rothenberg-Aalami said, indicating that this is where donors come in and make sure the companies get paid. On the other hand, donors vanish over time.

“It’s complicated. Someone has to come up with these solutions,” she said.

Impressive interest

“I’m just impressed with how many people here are interested in the topic. That’s exciting,” Rothenberg-Aalami said after the Four Peaks Salon conversation Thursday night. “I learned a lot. The students here have looked at the issues more deeply. There are practitioners here who have a local perspective. There is just a lot of momentum for the topic and lots of points of intersection to demonstrate that, and they engaged with lots of great questions,” she said. “It was exceptional.”

After living in Seattle for three years Rothenberg-Aalami recognizes that Seattle is a unique community. The area combines a strong industry of technology and innovation with the interest for civic involvement that is higher than almost anywhere else in the United States, said Rothenberg-Aalami, a fifth generation Californian who has spent more time abroad than at home since the mid-1990s.

“But people are also pretty insular here. They are very local, and people don’t cross from Queen Anne to Bellevue to expand their horizons,” she concluded with a laugh.

Four Peaks events focus on the concepts of innovation, community, entrepreneurship and entertainment, and are designed to bring together a network of content creators, technologists, entrepreneurs and community leaders who collaborate on ideas, projects and platforms that support innovation, storytelling, sustainable economies and strong social capital. The Four Peaks Summit, scheduled for October 2011, will be the culmination of the project, in partnership with the MCDM program.  The next Four Peaks Salon event is scheduled for May, and will take place in conjunction with the Seattle International Film Festival.

Related Posts

• June 7, 2011 -- Content Is King In South Africa Conference (3)
• April 5, 2011 -- Intent vs. Impact (0)
• September 21, 2010 -- Going Epic regarding the Future We Make (4)
• January 26, 2012 -- The Anatomy of an MCDM Foundation Course (1)
• September 29, 2011 -- The Digital and the Forbidden: My Trip to Beijing (3)

It’s ultimately a fool’s errand, especially when you’re stuck in the foggy middle of this tumultuous change.  But change it is — with business models in the heat of disruption.  From journalism, to publishing, to music, to advertising and even to academia — as we quickly leave the 20th century mass production world behind.  Bubbles burst, value propositions turn upside down and now we must constantly question what we must to do engage in the era of an infinite choice of ideas.

The strategic decision we’ve made at the MCDM is to pioneer the concept of “community scholarship.”  Fundamentally, it’s about eradicating the walls between higher education and our community to engage in relevant, valuable partnerships that allow us to share our learning, and for us to learn through collaboration.  By doing so we want to bring a fresh look to these emerging business models, even as we enable our students to make some sort of professional or personal transformation during their time in the program.  This is the extrinsic and intrinsic value of exhorting all of us to “Make The Change” as we set aside the revolutionary talk of our previous marketing-based call to action “The Revolution is Here.  Are You?” [For more on the MCDM's origins, see this just posted article MCDM: The Beginning.]

Hosting TEDx Seattle on April 16, 2010 was a turning point in the little-graduate-program-that-could’s lifetime.  Not only did we bring together communities from throughout our region that rarely congregate in one place, but we made a name for ourselves as folks who could truly execute at the highest possible standard.

This success continues to pay dividends, as it raises the profile of the MCDM and the currency of the degree itself.  In the last two weeks:

- We co-hosted a talk by Evgeny Morozov (author, “The Net Delusion”) with the World Affairs Council. Over a hundred people attended.
- We wrapped the successful five-part “Storyteller Uprising” lecture series in partnership with Seattle Arts and Lectures.
- We co-hosted SEAchange 2011, a Four Peaks “bridge” event on environmental disaster and media, with the Department of Communication, the College of the Environment and UW Libraries.

This Thursday, April 14, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Kane Hall, I invite you to see how strong our “community scholarship” has become.  We continue to develop powerful ideas with the public, and push the boundaries of interactive media, even as we maintain the focus on our ever-expanding curriculum.

“Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Emerging Markets: What’s Good for Them, Is Good for Us.”  The salon will marry our highly influential Media Space TV show with a participative conversation to follow (along with some yummy light refreshments).  It will also blend content from Anita Verna Crofts’ “Emerging Markets in Digital Media” course from fall quarter, with her current class, “Social Tools for Social Change.”  MCDM faculty (and Four Peaks co-founder) Kraig Baker will serve as M.C. while Anita will host the conversation that follows my interview with Jessica Rothenberg-Aalami, co-author of “Technology at the Margins: How IT Meets the Needs of Emerging Markets.” Scott Macklin and Beth Koemans will pull off their usual production magic.

On top of that, we will take Seattle startup Intersect’s terrific storytelling platform for a test ride that evening, as we look for new ways to connect participants and collect ideas.  It’s going to be an awesome night, so RSVP here if you’d like to attend!

But the week isn’t over.

It seems as if we’re solicited at least once a week to partner with another organization on an event or an academic collaboration.  So we’ve become far more selective to ensure that these opportunities align with our core mission.  But it was hard to turn down Adapt International’s request to co-host the live feed from TEDxRamallah on Friday, April 15th and 16th on the anniversary of our very own TEDx Seattle.  I spent a lot of time in Ramallah as a journalist, and I’m thrilled that we can showcase inspiring talks from that part of the world (though true to the problematic nature of that region, the main event will actually be held in Bethlehem, where I also spent many a Christmas Eve!).

Similar to our partnership with the Gates Foundation and TEDx Change last September, we’ll host a local program prior to the start of the live feed.  We’ll serve as the official host of TEDxRamallah Seattle, joining a number of venues around the world, including Boston, Berlin and Dubai.  It’s free, it starts at 9 p.m. on Friday night, and it all happens in the very familiar environs of Communications 120 and 126.  RSVP here.

Wait, there’s more!

- Seattle Magazine’s June issue will focus on the region’s “Creative Class.”  We had a hand in helping to shape that topic, and Four Peaks will be included.

- The May Four Peaks Salon on film and gaming is now part of the official 2011 Seattle International Film Festival schedule.  Details soon.

Yes, I know that taglines can be kind of vacuous in their marketing-speak.  But in this time of tumult when even academia must now prove its worth on a daily basis (something I wholeheartedly embrace), I see “Make The Change” not as a sales pitch, but as a commandment to us all.

Related Posts

• January 26, 2012 -- The Anatomy of an MCDM Foundation Course (1)
• June 20, 2011 -- Graduating MCDM: Another Milepost on the Journey (1)
• September 21, 2010 -- Going Epic regarding the Future We Make (4)
• May 2, 2009 -- Twitter & Skype classroom coverage of Paul Gillin (4)
• February 2, 2009 -- Videos of UW Insight: The Digital President event (0)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related Posts

• January 26, 2012 -- The Anatomy of an MCDM Foundation Course (1)
• June 20, 2011 -- Graduating MCDM: Another Milepost on the Journey (1)
• April 18, 2011 -- Reverse Innovation: A Two-Way Street to Global Tech Solutions (2)
• April 13, 2011 -- Make The Change (1)
• May 2, 2009 -- Twitter & Skype classroom coverage of Paul Gillin (4)