TLC Announces Three New Clients

The Learning Collective announces three new clients.   We are acting as the “in-house” online educational experts for Ketchum and their account with a leading provider of online classes to middle and high school students.  We’re advising UCLA on the potential development of an online emergency preparedness tool for developmentally disabled adults.  And we’re overseeing Mojo Markeing & Media’s Jamaican charitable programs, and related digital promotions, stemming from The Mojo 6 LPGA/CBS golf tournament.  Learn more about what we do.

UNICEF Rapid Prototyping Lessons

Interesting lessons learned excerpted from UNICEF’s Stories of Innovation …

This video is a synopsis of the projects, themes and trouble-shooting expressed at the Design Days event on May 10-11 at UNICEF NYHQ.

We have edited down a conversation between UNICEF sponsored rapid design prototypers to profile what they have created in order to respond to and alleviate actual needs of families and children. This video is intended to help make transparent the iterative process that development must undergo in order to create a new device that can respond to global concerns. Also touched on are ways for the organization to make the process of creating prototypes more streamlined, and the best method to take what is developed and to make it open source in order to create a sustainable and beneficial outcome to those that need it.

For Design Days we invited designers and engineers who have worked with us to discuss UNICEF, the design process, and recommendations for future design collaborations.

Lessons Learned:

UNICEF needs methods for iterative and flexible design contracting; we can’t always know what the end result will look like.

UNICEF would benefit from understanding and discussion of the design process before embarking on projects.

We need to work with open-source designers and engineers so that whatever we pay to have produced is public domain.

“Research” and “development” need to happen with end users, in the field.

Related article:

• UNICEF to Offer Free SMS to Nepalese Youth (appscout.com)

Digital Playground Inspires Slumdog

Earlier this month, the MacArthur Foundation announced the winners of the third annual Digital Media and Learning competition.  There are some great projects, especially the Learning Lab Awardees which won up to $200,000 to further their initiatives.

A project that particularly caught our eye is Hole-in-the-Wall, the inspiration for the book “Q&A” which inspired the movie Slumdog Millionaire.  Bridging the digital divide by reaching previously underserved youth in the developing world … urban slums and remote-rural populations, ethnic minorities, juvenile home detainees, and children with special needs … Hole-in-the-Wall has installed over 700 internet-enabled public Playground Learning Stations across India, Bhutan, Cambodia and countries in the African continent.  Game-activities promote experiential learning that is mapped to prescribed primary grade curricula across various subjects, Hole-in-the-Wall’s Activity Based E-Learning Solution imparts a playful learning environment by encouraging learning through self and group exploration beyond the classroom.

Related articles:

• Teaching: Inspiring British children, Slumdog style (telegraph.co.uk)
• Slumdog reveals learning treasures (guardian.co.uk)
• Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out (debaird.net)
• Reimagining Learning: Vote in a Digital Media Competition (wired.com)
• Fiji Reef- From The West Side To West Pacific. (stuckinfijimud.blogspot.com)
• Guest Post: Four Insights for Youth Marketers from DML 2010 (ypulse.com)

Thought Leaders vs Company Bloggers

Now that businesses have all rushed to have Twitter and Facebook profiles and to maintain company blogs, has the onslaught of information made it actually more difficult to get your message heard?

Business strategy and information technology consultant Stowe Boyd wrote a blog post on Thursday entitled “Thought Leadership: Beyond Marketing” in which he suggests that the rise of social media might be making us immune to marketing. Boyd suggests that startups might benefit from rethinking how they position themselves online to land on the side of that signal-to-noise ratio so that they’re actually heard.

Boyd observes that “Even in a time of great noise, people are still looking for guidance: they still need to make informed decisions, and to take action on their own behalf or on behalf of their companies. To do so, they look more than ever to those individuals and organizations that they trust, those that have credibility and hard-won reputations.” In order to capitalize on this search for expertise, Boyd suggests that companies try to situate their online presence less in terms of marketing and more in terms of thought leadership.

Boyd says there are three obvious ways to do this: Hire a thought leader. Ally your company with innovative, leading-edge programs. And actively participate in the community discourse in your field, either through written publications or through speaking events.

But these might not be viable options for startups. Hiring a thought leader is likely to be cost-prohibitive. As Boyd notes, “A startup wondering how it can stand out in a crowded field may just punt, and go down the classic social media route: the CEO and/or marketing folks will blog on the company website, and hope that people read the posts; they pay to attend conferences, and hope that they can get a speaking slot; and they try to make the company and its various spokespeople seem to be highly regarded in the community. This is the path that all companies seem to head down, so it comes as no great surprise that it generally doesn’t lead to outstanding results.”

Boyd suggests some alternatives… Read them via Read, Write Web

Related articles

• Recommended read: Stowe Boyd – /Message – Thought Leadership: Beyond Marketing (fredzimny.wordpress.com)
• Finding Influencers – Part One (webmetricsguru.com)
• The CEO’s Role in Big Agency Digital Credibility (socialmediatoday.com)

The Emotional Web

Online communities and resources focused on peoples’ emotional health have been around for a while.  This includes the youth space through efforts like icouldbe.org’s online mentoring community which has been around for the past 10 years.  And other resources tailored to help youth deal with particular issues, such as thesafespace.org to help prevent and cope with teen dating violence, have been adding value for a while.

But online functionalities, coupled with sourced content, designed to help folks deal with emotional issues represent a new direction for the web … an emotional rather than factual web.

Consider pepfly.  Currently in beta, Pepfly is built on the scientifically supported idea that changing your everyday feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in small ways can have a powerful effect over time.  Pepfly is an app that connects people to emotional experiences using the web.  Pepfly uses a psychology recommendation engine to recognize the words you use to describe yourself and make sense of them in psychological terms.  It uses a matching algorithm to connect your psychological state to a piece of media that might work for you. It uses a learning system to find patterns in your ratings so that it can deliver more of what works for you and less of what does not.  Check out their FAQs.

Related Stuff

• New Study Proves Jealousy Blinds and Distracts (beliefnet.com)
• 2005 Just in time coaching emotional intelligence (slideshare.net)
• Emotional Intelligence: Learning To Roll With The Punches (peterhbrown.wordpress.com)
• Psychology Professor to Examine Relationship Between Music and Emotions Using Moodagent (indiemusictech.com)