Schedule Update

Updated the schedule to include the white paper sub-assignments.

Project & Proposal

Overview

What is a white paper? It can mean many things. Generally, it is a comprehensive explanation of the state of the art of a new technology or social phenomenon. It is a document that is designed to present the case for a particular strategic decision. In most cases today, it veers closely to marketing, albeit generally with more facts than hyperbole (though not always). For this course, we are not looking for marketing literature, but for the kind of briefing a think tank might produce: opinionated but not biased. By reading your white paper, a person should feel that they understand the current state of the art, and have an idea of the trajectory of a new idea within a field, as well as the threats and opportunities offered by that trajectory. It need not include original, primary research (e.g., surveys or social experimentation), but it should draw together the current literature and thinking on a topic.

In this class, the final project will be for you—in groups of two or three students—to create a white paper and a presentation. These should be of professional quality, polished, precise, accurate, and interesting. By the end of the semester, you should feel confident in identifying yourself as an expert in this narrow area. I expect that this will not be a description of a specific technology (e.g., the MacBook Pro), but a class of technologies, or a social arrangement or trend.

Choosing a topic

The topic of your white paper should be narrow enough that you can read and understand the related literature exhaustively, but not so narrow that it would be of little interest to a reasonably large group of people. For example, a previous student created a white paper that addressed the use of RFID in food packaging, another took on a more technical issue: GPS-time-synched servers. In both cases, the students examined what choices were critical, explained the evidence that helped to make sense of that, and made recommendations.

You should have in mind a particular group of people who have to make a particular decision. In the first case above, the author was addressing the producers of perishable items, and particularly those who were likely to sell to Wal-Mart, since Wal-Mart was driving the adoption of RFID in several industries. In the second case, the author was addressing people who bought servers that needed to be used in secure operations, especially banking. In both cases, there was some generalized audience in mind, and some idea of what kinds of decisions they might need to make, as well as specific examples of people in the target audience (by name & position). Most food producers may not have even heard of RFID when this paper was created, and while many of the people who purchased servers had used other technologies to keep records of the time, these were generally not GPS driven. As a result, each author needed to educate her respective audience about the technology, its application, its costs, its benefits, the needs it met, the opportunities it created, the threats it entailed.

Each also presented recommendations. These were not simply “You should use RFID.” Often the recommendation is part of a “lynchpin” analysis: if this happens, you are likely to face that threat. Often it indicates conditions under which a decision might be made (e.g., wait until Wal-Mart codifies its standards before purchasing RFID equipment, but begin making changes to your own stock management systems to track RFID codes, in addition to UPC codes, now). The recommendations are rarely simply “buy product X,” but instead lay out the decisions that must be considered in making a strategic decision, and providing the data helpful to making that decision.

Steps in Writing the White Paper

This is a fairly major undertaking, and I don’t want you to expend that much effort going down the wrong path. Rather than asking for a single deliverable at the end of the semester, I am requesting that you provide interim descriptions of the work you are doing:

- Proposal (Oct 18)
- Annotated Bibliography (Oct 30)
- Outline (Nov 6)
- Final white paper, including formatting, charts, graphs, etc. (Dec 11)
- Presentation (Nov 29 / Dec 6)

More details will be provided in assignments for each stage.

Evaluating the Final White Paper

In evaluating the white paper, I will be looking for an expert opinion, grounded in evidence, presented in way easily understandable by someone in your target audience (and by a knowledgeable member of the general public). Generally, a white paper should have the following elements:

First, there should be a very clear explanation of the problem you will be exploring. It is best if you can find a problem. The problem may simply be “your competitors are creating more usable payment services by automatically doing currency exchange,” and then explore the decisions that need to be made in order to implement an automatic currency exchange system. The problem should be stated succinctly, and in such a way that the reader can quickly understand whether the report applies to them. In other words, you need to indicate why the reader should find your paper worth reading. Generally, providing evidence that a crisis or difficulty is looming and that it should be planned for is a good way of doing this.

The white paper should describe the current processes, policies, technologies, or state of events, along with how things came to be as they are now; the state of the art, and how we got there. It should identify the major “drivers” of change, and what effects they have had. It should indicate what organizations or groups are the most influential in this process and why.

The work should draw on, and cite, the major literature of the field. I may not be an expert in each of these areas, but if I can quickly find a piece of literature that appears to refute your position, and you have not cited it, that would not be good. Likewise, I expect the quality of your sources of information to add to your credibility. If you cite Wikipedia and TMZ, we might have a problem.

The writing should be clear, concise, and correct. I can shrug off small errors in your blog posts, but since every word of your final project should have been read at least four or five times, I will not be happy with an “its” for “it’s.” Really, grammatical constructions and a logical arguments are a basic necessity at this level—no amount of cleverness will save you if the writing is bad.

It should be logically organized, each piece clearly fitting together to form a whole. Even a cursory glance should make clear what the subsections of your paper are and how they might fit together to form a larger argument. It should be compelling and interesting, making use of concrete examples, but clearly abstracting them so that general rules can be understood. It should convey a clear feeling of confident expertise.

The work should look good. A plain, double-spaced word document will not do it for me. Think of your audience: probably a group of busy executives. They want eyecatching charts, graphs, and diagrams. They want bullet-points and boxed-text. They want something that is easy to scan, easy to read, easy to parse, and easy to grok deeply.

The final paper presentation should be equally polished and professional. No “umms,” no bullets on your slides, no extemporized talk—unless you are already really good at giving such talks, and imbue this one with a great deal of structure. Since I will be recording the talk at the end of the semester, I recommend that you try recording it and critiquing it ahead of time, either within your group or along with other groups. Again, consider your audience to be a busy group of professionals who have other demands on their time: how do you keep them in their seats with eyes and ears on you?

Proposal

The proposal for your project is due on October 19. The proposal should consist of no more than 1200 words, and should include:

• Who the authors are.
• A summary problem statement: State the problem you will be addressing in 2-3 sentences, and indicate why it is an important problem.
• An indication of the audience you will be addressing; the narrower the better.
• Two or three people whom you would consider experts in this area.
• Two or three articles or books that you think will be essential to your work
• The top academic journal or industry publication that relates to the work you will be addressing.
• A website or two that applies to the work you are doing.
• Some key ideas, technologies, trends, or players that—at this very early stage—you think will be particularly important to the project.
• A plan for assembling the annotated bibliography: who will be looking at what parts of the literature and when? (The bibliography is due on October 30, followed shortly by the outline.)

Schedule Update

Please note that I’ve changed the readings for next week. Sorry for the last minute–kinds sneaked up on me. Remember to do signalled stopping on one of the two readings.
Also, be ready next Thursday to present a compelling and exciting topic for your final whitepaper. Be ready to sell it in under 2 minutes.  Meant to do this tonight, but it totally slipped my mind. I’m expecting that by the end of the evening, you will be in your groups and ready to get moving on the project.

“Dating Post”?

A couple of people have asked about the “dating post” assignment on the syllabus. Ignore that please! You should be editing the wiki instead. And remember that next class meeting, you need to:

1. Print out someone’s blog post and be ready to talk about it (argue with it, etc.).

2. Be ready to share a very preliminary idea (a sentence or two) about an area you would like to do a whitepaper on for the course. We’ll talk a bit about what the project entails on Thursday, and go around the circle for folks to throw out ideas.

Linkages

Willow caught that the link to my chapter (the optional one) was wrong. It’s fixed now:

Optional: Halavais, A. (2006). Scholarly blogging: Moving toward the visible college. In A. Bruns & J. Jacobs, Eds., Uses of blogs. New York: Peter Lang.

Be sure to head over to the wiki to update the Tapscott outline.

Missed vids

In preparation for tonight, I ran across a couple of videos that I didn’t need to use.

About eight years ago I used to teach a multimedia course in which students had a range of projects (HTML, video, Flash). One of those was to remix trailers. I found the demo I did. (Can’t show the student work, since I don’t have their permission.) My excuses: this was on an old G3/Media 100 system. Pretty top end of the consumer machines when we bought it, but still took an hour or so to render something this length. And this is after several generations of video tape, then imported and transcoded three times or four times . If I had to do this today, it would probably take me about 15 minutes from start to finish, using only free software. The tech has changed tremendously.

Second, I liked this because it was an almost instantaneous remixing of what has become an iconic meme:

Need $10,000?

It might be too early for some of you who have just started blogging, but if you’ve been at it for a while, you might take a run at a $10,000 scholarship for student bloggers. Deadline for submitting your blog is October 6.

Remix != mash

On the video side, I’m liking the new Bob Dylan viral campaign that allows you to remix the iconic music video. Here’s mine.

That said, I don’t think this really fits the definition of a mash-up, since it only consists of one original work, not in combination with any other *completed* media. I suppose that if you combined it with another work (poetry? corporate slogans?) it might be getting closer, but I don’t think it is. I think the combination of two streams that work on their own is necessary.

My favorite mashup

It’s difficult to choose a single favorite mash-up, but I am really a fan of things that are done with the Google Maps API. What this does is basically allow you to use Google maps to display whatever data you feed it. I think my favorite, at the moment, is the way it is used in Google Book Search.

Take, for example, how it is used on the page for The Catholic Encyclopedia. If you go to that page and scroll down, you will see what place names appear in the book. As you can see, it’s pretty Eurocentric! One could be forgiven for not recognizing where Christianity got its start…  Contrast that with the 1919 Encyclopedia Americana. Can you guess what that map will look like? (I bet you’re wrong…) How about The Iraq War? Or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Wanderings of a Spiritualist? Dibbell’s My Tiny Life (about virtual worlds)? The Network Revolution? A book called Mexico’s Pacific Coast? (OK, that last one is a lot more like what you might expect.)

There are a lot of really cool Google Maps mashups. I use the pedometer all the time, and a number crime mashups are great examples of using mashups in journalism, but there is something strangely compelling about converting a book to a map of the world.

Jakob Neilson makes your blog better

I mentioned in class a couple of short articles by Neilson that can help your blogging. Here they are:

> How Users Read on the Web

> Write Articles, Not Blog Postings

On the latter, I keep beating myself up over wondering who the “world leader” was. My money is on  Ahmadenijad.