(x-posted at Cac.ophony.org: please visit to comment)

This is the first in a series of posts presenting video from our 9th Annual Symposium on Commumication and Communication-Intensive Instruction.

We’re going to start off with four videos (we’ll publish them over the next four days) from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World.”

What I love about this particular workshop is the generous balance in Gardner’s approach to Web 2.0: he talks with equal interest about the inanity present in much online conversation (and offline conversation) and the new implications for connectedness offered by the Web 2.0 world. Unlike many thinkers who’ve chimed in on communication in a Web 2.0 world, he sees it as neither a panacea or a harbinger of doom. His interest is in exploring the rich ideas generated by these new methods of communication, and in generating more questions than answers. We were so fortunate to have Gardner play such a significant role in our Symposium for the second straight year. His enthusiasm was infectious, and his social note taking was prodigious.

In this first segment, Gardner and the attendees of his workshop explore Twistori and Twittervision, two Twitter apps that offer provocative examples of how “connectedness” is changing in the Web 2.0 world. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to catch the beginning of this workshop; we pick things up a few minutes in.

(x-posted at Cac.ophony.org: please visit to comment)

The staff of the Institute feel that it’s important to capture and preserve as much of the thinking that takes place at each Symposium as possible.  Our fellows will be taking notes at the morning table discussions, and we will be photographing and filming much of the day.

We encourage participants to share their thoughts about the event, in real time if possible, using Twitter.

WiFi Access
If you wish to use Baruch’s wireless network while at the Symposium, we’ll need to register you for access. If you’re planning to bring a laptop or some other wifi enabled device and would like access to Baruch’s wireless network, please let us know by the end of business on Wednesday (4/29) by sending an email to Thomas.Harbison@baruch.cuny.edu with the subject line “Wifi access.”

Twitter
If you are a Twitter user and wish to comment on the day’s activities, please use the #blsci hashtag in your updates. We will set up a large display in our break area and will follow Symposium tweets in real time. Placing #blsci in your tweets will make it possible to easily aggregate all the day’s tweeting.

Via Tech Crunch, an interesting article on the success of Twitter as a powerful means of communicating with a defined and focused audience. Here’s a juicy excerpt:

Back to Twitter: Why Audience works
Twitter works and enjoys such strong attachment because it provides real-time access to a well-defined audience. The backlog of all previous tweets is a guarantee of permanence (you can even search it) and you can catch up on it anytime. As a result, people use Twitter because they have an idea of who will see their lightweight messages and this sense of audience is reinforced by @replies, re-tweets and references in future conversations (online and offline).

Designing for the sense of Audience is a powerful tool to create cohesion and a sense of utility among users of a service. This lesson from Twitter can apply to many other services too. But before leaving the current discussion, it’s helpful to look at a service that has missed the full power of Audience so far.

Facebook: Designed for Audience?
Not so much. Facebook isn’t about Audience? That’s ridiculous, you’ll say — so let me clarify. I fully agree that social network profiles are all about self-expression and being seen, but a platform for self-expression isn’t necessarily designed for the audience that does “the seeing.”

Profile Pages on Facebook can have audiences of course, but this requires that users continually roam Facebook to look for news in their network. Facebook realized this limitation and introduced the News Feed. Its intent was to move a user’s “acts and performances” from the stage of the profile page to a single and central stage, a single place for Audience.

Read the whole article here.