Kirk at Department of Education in MN. Digital Storytelling course.

Sitting across in the u-shaped table was a blond, bald and quite loud classmate who was full of declarative statements made to sparkle debate every other minute. After many infuriating debates, Kirk Mastin and I became good friends and I started to watch his ideas develop. He is a creative, sometime rebellious geek that kept telling us that monkeys can take pictures and professional photographers were out of business.

In the latter part of our Masters, Kirk started honing on a concept that would become his main voice: Lo-Fi, Hi-Style.

His idea started to take shape when we were shooting mini-documentaries with the Flip Camera (the Flip was new to market) and Kirk started making comparison videos with his pro equipment and even bootstrapping the audio quality by using a Mini iPod as a mic. Kirk’s premise was that you can apply professional techniques to low-grade consumer tools to make beautiful images and stories and increase the overall value of production. Instead of resisting the  democratization of photography, Kirk thinks professional with trained eye can join the movement by educating and helping the crowds to produce with better quality.

Kirk is now a community manager of Zoopa, a company that crowdsources adversing videos and he now is writing a book on Lo-Fi Hi-Style.

I was reading danah boyd’s post today (hey, I’ve missed you!) where she was talking about

being chastised for multi-tasking during some conference in Italy and proceeded to explain this a generational gap. Perhaps. My 72-year-old class mate, Mark Shea may disagree with that.

I am spoiled and tend to find myself in environments where I can do all the Twitter, Web, phone etc. And at school it was encouraged and as danah says I found it quote engaging. Now, being on the other side of the fence (teaching) I also continue the non-tradition and encourage students to Twitter, comment, blog, search and email while in class. I may be a little off putting to some of my speakers, but I find it to be a great tool for learning as I can read some of the reactions and thoughts of the quieter students as well as the ones that like to speak up, and in fact I count it all as ‘participation’. Plus, I really like it when I can expand on some topic when someone takes it upon itself to post links, commentary, clarifications, etc.

During Berkman’s 10 year conference, the use of these tools in class was a hot topic of debate in one of the Digital Natives sessions. But most of the educators present admitted that pre-laptop times there were notes, whispers and hand signals not to mention the frequently used snoozing - people will always pay attention when they want to.

Here Twitter handles for the summer courses:

@kegill #uwtwtrbook

Drew Keller #com597c

@agilminer #uwmetrics

Inside Facebook confirm rumors of Facebook testing a new virtual currency. Have we seen something like this before? A closed system, with lots of new people interacting with no real purpose –just sharin’ — and exchanging money for virtual goods? Well, yes we have, remember SecondLife? Of course, Facebook is way easier to use and much more popular.

If FBDollars take off, we can bring back the excited anthropologists and economists that dreamed up of true virtual economies (with virtual jobs), if not it will be just another add-on to what’s already a very noisy and crowded space (notice the efforts to help you filter out the noise, such as you can categorize your friends and voila! now you can pay attention to those you really care about and forget the other 678 ‘friends’)

I participated on a collaborative book on social media to raise funds for Susan G Komen. Check it out at:

http://theproject100.wordpress.com/

Jeff Caswell edited and made a public call for submissions back in October. He gathered 100 articles from 100 marketers and created a ‘wisdom of the crowd’ guide for marketing in this new era. It’s full of humorous references and event tweets, yes tweets on paper. There’s actual good advice there too. I’m not done reading the book, but I have to say so far I enjoy everyone’s take on social media and marketing (or lack of).

Cool project to be on and I’m looking forward to see feedback from friends I’ve sent the book to.

I guess now I have to buy this to figure out what ‘’self-knowing, self improving builder’ means. Clever, but will I buy it? Would you?

I took the 43 Things Personality Quiz and found out I’m a

Self-Knowing Self-Improving Builder