Ted Valentin slides

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A few people have asked about Ted Valentin's Prezi "slides".

They can be found on the web, here!

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Home exam

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The home exam is now available in Bilda (in "Documents"). It was uploaded slightly before 08.00 on Sunday morning December 12. You have 24 hours to complete the exam and upload it (.doc or .pdf file) to the folder "home exam" in Bilda.

Do note that you can replace an exam with a later version - so it might be a good idea to upload an almost-finished version just to be on the safe side!

Read the instructions for the exam carefully and follow them! If something needs to be clarified, please pose your question here, I will check out the blog at least a couple of times during Sunday.

You can get a maximum of 25 points on the exam. I'm not really fond of allowing late exams to be handed in but (at least) one student has an ok reason for having to hand in the exam late and I do take into account that you are writing this exam on a Sunday. Late exams should be uploaded to the "late home exam" folder.

• I will deduct 3.5 points (~15% of the maximum number of points) from exams that are handed in up to 10 hours late (e.g. before 18.00 Monday night).
• I will deduct 6 points (~25% of the maximum number of points) from exams that are handed in up to 24 hours late (e.g. before 08.00 Tuesday morning). A 6-point deduction corresponds to a lowering of the grade with one step (a B becomes a C etc.)
• Exams that are handed in later than 24 hours after the deadline automatically fail and will not be graded. You will then have to do the exam again at a later point in time. It will obviously not be easier to pass the exam the second time around so please make sure to hand it in (in time).

After these admonitions, I'd like to end this blog post by wishing you all good luck!

PS. I glanced at the course evaluations and will get back here, on this blog, with some feedback, but since I go away and will not bring the course evaluations with me, that will have to wait until January.

Rich pictures feedback

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Thank you for your presentations yesterday!

They were for sure more innovative and exciting than the "business plans" the students wrote in the course last year, but next year's presentations will be even better. I will now be able to give them more detailed/specific advice as I have a better grasp of the exercise, the problems and the bottlenecks involved.

I congratulate the two winning groups; Good deeds (winner) and Sharp fashion (runner-up). There were other groups I liked (Street fun for example seemed like a really useful idea and there were obviously a lot of thinking behind Geniq and Rich Pictures - but a five-minute presentation was not enough to understand it). I will obviously need to read your accompanying documents in order to fully appreciate your posters.

Anyway, all groups who presented have "passed" the compulsory group assignment (part of the examination) and thus also every person whose name is on your posters.

Here are some thoughts/feedback from the group assignment that will inform my thinking about and instructions for next year's students. I also got some feedback from Linda B who told me that poster presentations like the one you did yesterday are common in the Netherlands):

- The "lecture hall" sucked. The first groups (high level of noice) had a definitive disadvantage but the place was not a good choice. To change to a better lecture hall has the very highest priority.

- Some posters had too little text; you were supposed to "clearly state a target group, a problem area and a proposed (social media) solution (service or tool)" on your poster but several groups didn't

- Perhaps poster should be more self-explantatory and able to tell a casual reader what it is all about without someone standing beside them. That way you could put up the posters in the morning, let other students look at them all morning (and colleagues of mine grade them) and then present them in the afternoon.

- Perhaps a more open format where people drift from poster to poster rather than more formal 5-minute presentations of the concept where everyone listens (but few hear). That way you will also get more questions, comments, feedback on your poster from other students.

- You voted for the poster "you liked the best". I should probably develop the criteria for evaluating the posters and students should know about them in advance so they can adapt their posters to these criteria. "Self-explanatoriness" (above) might then be one critera for judging/evaluating a poster.

Anyway, you were guinea-pigs/pioneers. Thank you for your effort.

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Apology

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In the criteria for examination and grading, it is stated that "Each seminar assignment can be regarded as a (tough) exam question that is done in advance of the final exam".

I stated in the beginning of the course that my goal would be to read and grade seminar assignments from one to two seminar groups in parallel to ordinary course activities. I have dismally failed to live up to that goal.

In hindsight, the seminar assignments can in fact be regarded exactly as "exam questions done in advance", but that I will read, grade and provide feedback on together (rather than in advance of) the final exam. For which I am sorry.

It's unfortunately been a very hectic autumn for me, some of which is chronicled in my academic blog. Truth be told, I have probably taken on and participated in too many different activities during this period and while I am sorry for not having been able to grade your assignments, I am on the other hand quite content with having been able to keep up with all the other work with the course (prepare for seminars, lectures and guest lectures, upload stuff to Bilda, write (more or less) timely messages to this blog etc.).

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Summary of course readings

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No readings for the last regular lecture this week (on the topic of games)!

Readings or no readings - all lectures can of course be drawn upon for exam questions though! (And don't forget the very last f2f activity in the course - our last guest lecture with our invited sort-of high-profile Internet entrepreneur Ted Valentin on Friday after lunch!)

Here are a summary of what we have read throughout the course:

Benkler (chapters 1-8 and 10)

Lecture/seminar 3

- Ramos (200X)

- Shirky (2003)

Lecture/seminar 4

- Jenkins (2008)

Lecture/seminar 5

- Harmon (1998)

- Postman (1990)

- Carr (2008)

- Lundblad (2004)

- Morozov (2010)

- Bardi (2008)

- Pargman (2010)

- Greer (2009a)

- Greer (2009b)

Lecture/seminar 6

- Fallows (2010)

- Witt (2006)

- Gillmor (2006a)

- Gillmor (2006b)

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Guest lecture 5: Ted Valentin (Fri Dec 10 at 13-15)

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Guest lecturer: Ted Valentin, Internet entrepreneur

Title: Building a (social) website in 24 hours

Place: Lecture hall E2 (13-15 - please be on time!)

Abstract:

How do you build a social website in 24 hours? How do you monetize it? We will be looking at different ways to get visitors - and ways to make money. How do you quickly take advantage of the social graph and the taste graph?

How to prepare for the lecture:

Feel free to check out Ted's blog, tedvalentin.com. Ted informs us that he would very much appreciate to have questions posed in advance, or for you to tell him what areas you would like to know more about. You can post comments or questions for him HERE in the form of comments to this text. Ted will monitor, read and prepare for any questions posed here. Ted also emphatically states that "All questions are good questions!".

About Victor:

Ted Valentin is an Internet entrepreneur from Stockholm with a laptop and a "do-it-yourself" attitude. He sold his first startup in 2007 for $1.5 million. Today he runs a number of websites, including Restaurangkartan.se, Annonskartan.se and Blogipedia.com. He is the also the founder of 24 hour business camp.

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Readings for lecture 6

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The topic of this weeks lecture is journalism and citizen media. To prepare for the lecture, please read:

• Benkler, "The trouble with mass media" (chapter 6).(35 pages)
• Fallows, "How to save the news". The Atlantic, June 2010. (12 pages (in the original print magazine))
• Witt (2006), "Constructing a framework to enable an open source reinvention of journalism". (10 pages)
• Gillmor (2006), "We are all reporters now" (BBC News) (3 pages)
• Gillmor (2006), "Introduction" (11 pages) from his book "We the media: Grassroots journalism by the people, for the people".

35 + 12 + 10 + 3 + 11 = 71 pages

Notes:

- The text by Witt comes from the online (peer-reviewed) journal "First Monday" which publishes scholarly papers about the Internet (internet culture, the neworked information economy etc.).

- The chapter by Gillmore ("Introduction") will be uploaded to Bilda sometime tomorrow (Wednesday)

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