Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
Awhile ago, the Singapore Management University Students Association (SMUSA) did a large scale electronic survey to SMU students, asking them about satisfaction/dissatisfaction with various aspects of the school ranging from facilities, grading, professors and so on. The premise of this survey was so that they could know what the general population is feeling, and act on it.
Post-survey, I saw this pasted to one of the pillars in SMU:
SA Research
Here’s the thing though. I walked past this and immediately thought: This means 43% (or almost half) of SMU students don’t feel a sense of belonging to SMU. Wouldn’t that be a more grabbing or immediate statistic to display and act on?
Also, the poster asks those are in that 57%, who do feel a sense of belonging, if they have something to say about it. Wouldn’t it be more productive to ask those in the 43% to ask them if they have something to say about it?
That said, I’m not a research major. Would anyone who is like to chime in?
Tags: asking the right question, dissatisfaction, electronic survey, facilities, grading, professors, Research, research major, satisfaction, sense of belonging, singapore management university, smu students, smu students association, smusa
Posted in Research, SMU | 9 Comments »
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
If needing to take notes is my personal benchmark for how good a book is (like Joseph Jaffe’s Join The Conversation), then Andrew Keen’s Cult Of The Amateur falls firmly in the opposite category. To be honest, for the first half of the book I was waiting for the “haha gotcha!” moment, because no one could be this blind towards the benefits of Web2.0 and community and collaboration.
But I soon discovered it would never come.
Keen fancies his book a polemic, but what it really is, is a rant. After reading the first chapter, every subsequent chapter was merely a repetition of what was said before, albeit with different examples and/or research.
Speaking of research, that is the one thing that Keen does well. I enjoyed reading the statistics, but not the conclusions drawn. for example he gives a timeline for the decline in music sales and says something to the effect that is no coincidence that this happened at around the time of the internet’s birth.
Keen loves the old world. He loves the “cultural gatekeepers” like reporters, news anchors, editors, movie reviewers and the like. Maybe crowdsourcing doesn’t always work, but I would almost always rather determine whether I want to watch a movie based on what people say online, than that one singular review in the newspapers by a “cultural gatekeeper”. In fact I’m working on a deck talking about “The New Gatekeepers”, so obviously I am in direct opposition with Keen here.
One thing Keen does do well, is highlight the problems the internet has brought. Online gambling addiction, pornography, plagarism, not watching one’s online identity. I’m in agreement with these social ills, but the way he writes the book, it sounds like these eclipse everything good about Web2.0 (democratisation of media, more choice than ever via the long tail, experiences that we’d otherwise never have, collaboration, discussion, community, the list goes on). And he makes it sound that these are so terrible that we should just get rid of the internet entirely, although he stops just short of saying that.
Keen also points to Viacom suing YouTube as a “powerful message”, but my bet is that Viacom (who owns MTV, VH1 and Nickleodeon) is wishing they had bought YouTube instead of Google. Just think of the possibilities if Viacom owned that media channel.
All in all, I did not enjoy reading this book at all. Not just because it goes against everything I believe in about social media and community, but because the arguments are one sided. He talks about the money lost by Frito-Lay choosing to go with an amateur advertising campaign, and makes it the fault of social media. But is it anyone’s fault that “professionals” failed to deliver better content and creativity than the “amateurs”? He simply takes one side of the coin and runs with it.
For people already in this space, I wouldn’t recommend reading this book because it isn’t going to change your mind. The arguments are just not strong and/or compelling enough, and your money will be much better spent going towards a book that will help improve your social media life.
But hey don’t take my word for it, check out visual bookshelf on Facebook for many similar reviews, or just check out at this user-generated content by another reviewer (which I found while looking for the cover image). I bet Mr. Keen hates all these “amateur” review and wishes it were all done by a “cultural gatekeeper” instead.
Tags: andrew keen, cult of the amateur, cultutal gatekeepers, facebook, frito-lay, join the conversation, joseph jaffe, polemic, rant, Research, the new gatekeepers, viacom, visual bookshelf, web2.0, youtube
Posted in Books, Singapore | 3 Comments »
Thursday, January 24th, 2008
I really don’t know how new Google Notebook is, because officially the press release states May 2006, but I’ve not heard of it till now (nor have I heard of anyone discussing it).
What’s so great about it, comes about especially when doing research. When I travel or do research on a product or just general research for a paper, I usually end up creating a bookmark folder and dumping everything inside, and then when I need to consolidate my information I have to open up all the bookmarks again and find the relevant part. Either that or I cut and paste everything to one big Microsoft Word document, but then it’s not universally accessible (ie if I make note of travel places, unless I carry that document around, it’s useless outside of my desktop).
The solution? Google Notebook. It puts everything on one page, and you can even create sub-sections to find the exact things you want. I posted an image below for my exchange research, you can see that even though the entire sheet is called “Exchange”, I can separate them by schools (or whatever criteria I want), and easily see where different sections begin and end later. Of course, I can Google search the whole document as well. Can’t recommend this enough.
Click for full view
I think the best thing about this Google product, is that it’s instantly relevant. How many times have you downloaded something and it takes too long to fiddle around with and it gets uninstalled? Happened to me for Google Desktop. In fact I recently re-downloaded it after a year to see if it got better. Nope. I think they need to get their Desktop product team to learn a thing or two from their Notebook team. Not in terms of design, but in communicating what the product does better. The “Take A Tour” feature for Notebook is definitely far superior to that of Desktop.
Tags: Google, google desktop, google notebook, Research, Search
Posted in Google, Research, Search | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
There’s another post over at Marketing Pilgrim touching on the same article I posted about yesterday (original article here).
I think Marketing Pilgrim says the same thing as Seth Godin, in that obviously Googling something for hard facts is normal, but Googling for critical thinking is just going to fail. If people use multiple Google/Wiki sources to pool together their essay/paper and help structure it, it shouldn’t be a problem. But just taking the first search result from Google and repeating that definitely isn’t a good idea.
Tags: Google, Marketing, marketing pilgrim, Research, Search, Wikipedia
Posted in Google, Marketing, Research, Search | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
Search Engine Journal, a site I started reading regularly when doing my Google research, posts an interesting article about a Professor in Brighton that has banned Google in favour of traditional research like hardcopy journals. She says “Google is filling, but it does not necessarily offer nutritional content.”
This actually echoes something posted by Seth Godin in October, called The Wikipedia Gap, reacting to a similar incident where Wikipedia was apparently banned in research.
Note that in Godin’s post, he doesn’t claim that Wikipedia is a credible source of information (indeed, I’d never use that as a formal annotation), but it does provide good groundwork for knowing and appreciating the subject, before heading off to “serious” research.
I do wonder what would happen if this came to SMU.
Tags: Google, Research, Search, seth godin, Wikipedia
Posted in Google, Research, Search, Wikipedia | No Comments »
