One of the best storytellers I've met: Now easy and cheap to study with Doug Rushkoff

I am a huge fan of Douglas Rushkoff -there's little that he says that doesn't deserve mulling over at least. On top of that, he's one of the loveliest, least pretentious, and committed people I've ever met.

And what a storyteller: economics is usually dry.  Not this material, ever.

Doug is now giving classes that anyone can take. As of this Fall, he'll be a Full Professor of Media Studies at CUNY/Queens, the public university of New York City. He's teaching undergraduates as well as helping start a new Graduate Program in Media Studies, specifically targeted at activists and others who want to create change through media. You can study with him easily and cheaply - how fantastic is that?

See: http://www.qc.cuny.edu/Academics/Degrees/DAH/MediaStudies/Pages/MAinMediaStudies.aspx

This is what Doug says about the programme
Disclaimer: I get nothing from this except the pleasure of evangelising about someone worth listening to:

The idea is that media studies for the 20th Century was largely about reception: how we can “read” media such as TV and radio in order to better assess its intent and influence. Now that we’re in an interactive era, I think media studies has a lot more to do with how we create media, from email and tweets to journalism and movies. As I explained in the press release about the new program, “the essential skill in a digital age is to understand the biases of the landscape – to be able to think critically and act purposefully with these tools – lest the tools and companies behind them use us instead.”

It’s a truly fabulous department with an activist and intellectual bias, from Richard Maxwell (the leading scholar in the environmental impact of digital media devices and production) to Mara Einstein (Compassion Inc and Brands of Faith) to Amy Herzog (working on peep show arcades of 1970’s Times Square) to filmmaker Zoe Beloff to feminist and queer studies genius Joy Fuqua. And those are just the ones I’ve gotten to meet so far.

[Cheap and easy - what a world!]

You can take undergraduate or graduate courses at CUNY/Queens as a non-matriculated student, which means a la carte. That’s one of the main reasons I picked this school. I get a few emails a week from people asking how they can study with me, work on projects, or do some reading with me. Most schools require students to be full-time, and charge tens of thousand a year for the privilege. I wanted to be able to look into the faces of students across the seminar table without worrying that I was putting them in life-long debt.

So now is our chance. The undergraduate course is almost full, but the graduate course is not. Here they are, as well as how to register. You can also find application materials to join the program and get a Masters degree - in class schedules designed to let you have a job while you study.

Undergraduate Course: Media Studies 350: Propaganda
In this 15-week course, students will be exposed to the practice of propaganda as well as the assumptions underlying its use. What does the intentional application of propaganda techniques say about the governments and institutions using it, and what does its effectiveness say about the populations on which it is being practiced? Instead of taking a strictly historical approach, we will explore propaganda by venue and medium, including spectacle, atmospherics, television, and social media. For instance, in studying the use of spectacle we will compare the Roman games to the Nuremberg Rallies to an NFL football game. Our study of atmospherics will include Victorian The Crystal Palace, the 1964 Worlds Fair (which took place next door to this college), and Disneyworld. We will give particular focus to the migration of propaganda techniques between governments and corporations, as well as the way propaganda changes the greater media landscape of a society.

Graduate Course: Interactive Media Theory
The emergence of interactive technologies has profoundly altered our relationship to media and art from the position of passive spectators to that of active players - at least potentially. For longer than we might imagine, cultural theorists have foreseen these shifts, feared them, fought for them, celebrated them, and, clearly, misunderstood them. In this seminar, we will explore the thread of interactivity in cultural media as well as the opportunities and perils posed by the associated rise of mass interpretation, authorship, and bottom-up organization. It is our purpose not only to understand theories on interactive media as they emerged, but also to be capable of developing and arguing our own theoretical approaches.

How do you enroll? If you are already in a CUNY school, just sign up through the course catalogue. I will be accepting qualified undergraduates into the graduate seminar for the first semester or two. If you want to take either of my courses as a non-matriculated student, apply for non-matirculated status here http://www.qc.cuny.edu/admissions/graduate/applying/Pages/Non-Matriculation.aspx (they make it look hard but it’s very easy), and then, simply email me and I’ll put you in the course.

What banks can't do for themselves: Reuters offers innovation for financial services

Most of discussion about innovation focuses on tech inventions and billion-dollar exits. This story of creative thinking demonstrates that the bigger the business, the bigger the pay-off.

Despite the ubiquitous, continuous fall-out of the global financial crisis, and the continuous challenges within banking practice, there have been very few effective solutions offered.

To be fair, regional challenges take up a lot of our bandwidth. In the UK, we had a hard time agreeing on how to handle problems as local as a couple of beavers who showed up, unannounced, and are causing quite a row among conservationists. Once this is solved, try working your way up to the NHS lack of funding or benefits, and it's hard to see how it will all come out.

Now move to something with the enormous impact on everyone globally - say, transparency in global financial practice. And don't give up.

Cross-disciplinary innovation is probably the most effective because it brings with it a kind of perspective that an industry can not have for itself. So despite the crazy agreements required among stakeholders across countries and continents, Reuters has begun to make a real dent in the problem that the banks themselves have not been able to. And they've done it in less than a year.

Anna Mazzone is primarily responsible: she's worth checking out.

UK Research Council's Conference on the Digital Economy

A scary smart friend and client, David Stokes, has raved about a December conference that might be of interest. I write about it here because it won't get the kind of publicity that the more commercial events get.
It's called the DE2014 Symposium, and it's the prinicipal annual event of the Research Council's UK Digital Economy programme.
From what I'm told, the symposium is unique in bringing together the UK’s most innovative research thinkers with key members of the industrial, entrepreneurial, creative and finance communities.

It is not just for scientists, but is also aimed at entrepreneurs and basically anyone involved in the digital economy.
 
Check it out - more information than this, even, will be fully up next week at the same url.

Follow up on delivering information exactly when needed: this time, in person

Following from the last post, there's a reason that we need information delivered exactly when it's useful online: it's the way we think everywhere.

The best way to learn how to fish - or anything else, for that matter - is to master the skill in one context so that we can think fluently around all aspects of the problem we're solving.  Until we've got a lesson down in one area or kind of situation, human beings are not great at transferring learning among contexts.

It's a mistake many coaches make when they take people off-site: we might feel free and creative out of our normal work environment, but how do we sustain it when we trudge back into the office on Monday?

Terri Mcclements, a great thinker from PwC where I used to work, wrote about it here.