ma'ayan goes tumbling

Social media playground for Ma'ayan Plaut, Manager, Social Strategy & Projects at Oberlin College. Fall 2012 will find this blog dominated by #SoMeXco, an experimental college course I am coteaching with Ben Jones and Barbara Sawhill on social media.

[f525252-blog]

All the juice in only seventeen beats.

Read more: A Haiku or Two, on Tomatoes on Food52

[maayangoestumbling]

Poems, many of them tasty. Tomatoes will do that to you.

[ilovecharts]

Information vs Knowledge

via Greg Russell

[maayangoestumbling]

Too good to pass up.

[f525252-blog]

We’re cutting the ribbon to our online shop!

Read more: Provisions is Now Open! on Food52

[maayangoestumbling]

Oh my goodness. I can't. I CAN'T. I can't have this wonderful beautiful store within my Internet grasp.

(It's gorgeous. Don't go. It's too awesome.)

[fervidusmori]

One reason that people have artist’s block is that they do not respect the law of dormancy in nature. Trees don’t produce fruit all year long, constantly. They have a point where they go dormant. And when you are in a dormant period creatively, if you can arrange your life to do the technical tasks that don’t take creativity, you are essentially preparing for the spring when it will all blossom again.

Marshall Vandruff, one of the best teachers I have ever had, on artist’s block. Said during a webinar done on Visualarium to advertise his upcoming online course on animal anatomy (source links to webinar)  (via pale-afternoon)

I like this so much.

[explore-blog]

At their core, artists and scientists are not so different from one another. Both endeavor to solve our greatest mysteries through the power of imagination.

Bill O’Brien on art and science for The National Endowment of the Arts. 

Einstein and Nietzsche would agree.

(↬ It’s Okay To Be Smart)

I really truly love and believe this. During his keynote at HighEdWeb last October, Adam Savage (half of Mythbusters) shared a similar sentiment. Science is an art, and art is a science. I love that my work allows be to embrace both these statements simultaneously.

Quote like this one make me incredibly proud that I attended liberal arts school. Oberlin thoroughly embraces the arts and sciences in many ways, and I think the confluence of them on a singular campus makes for an immensely powerful creative experience.

[lillielillie]

Oh, Dev Bootcamp.

There is an activity where students teach other students what they’ve learned in a given phase at DBC, and I fought hard today to include “soft skills” as a category that should be taught to the incoming Phase Two students. So hard as to walk up to the white board and write it…

[maayangoestumbling]

This is a really excellent thing written by my friend Lillie. Read it.

I’m on the “soft skills” side of this post, in that I am not a developer but think having some coding skills would be a Good Thing for me to have for/with regards to my future. If I were writing on this hypothetical board, I would have fought like hell to have more human skill set options on the lesson plan to complement development.

If you’re in a learning mode, you’ll start making connections between all the things that are being thrown at you, and that will better inform your primary skills, too. You may be awesome at coding, but becoming awesome at how you interact with others can and will make you better not only at development, but at everything.

[elvira]

The failure of Storyboard was in its inability to find an editorial voice that resonated in the community. Tumblr users communicate with a pidgin lexicon of reaction GIFs, memes, and blog entries, but Storyboard took a more print-oriented approach. The content (and layout) was reminiscent of an in-flight magazine, as if trying to sell the reader on a particular destination. Of course, Storyboard did produce a variety of laudable content in partnership with esteemed publishers, most notably its Letters from Newtown project with Mother Jones and WNYC’s look inside the New York Times morgue (and the Daily Dot syndicated a significant number of Storyboard articles). But the numbers don’t lie and Storyboard’s most popular posts hover around just 6,000 notes – surely a factor in the decision to shutter it.

It’s not just Tumblr — most social networks don’t understand original content — paidContent (via elvira)

All this and more... If we're going to create original content, how do we measure its success? External is one thing, but hopefully, the group that takes it and runs is the internal one, the one the content was made for in the first place.

[staff]

A year ago, Tumblr did something unprecedented — we created an editorial team of experienced journalists and editors assigned to cover Tumblr as a living, breathing community. The team’s mandate was to tell the stories of Tumblr creators in a truly thoughtful way — focusing on the people, their...

[maayangoestumbling]

One of the coolest things I know of online is packing up. Sigh.

I wish, want, and NEED for us to follow the model of projects like Storyboard to tell the deep-down stories of things within our community. It's terribly sad that it's ending, but look at all the awesome that came out of it. Let's use that success and inspiration do more, yeah? Yeah!

[staff]

Fuck yeah! Tumblr is now made up of 100 million blogs.

[maayangoestumbling]

But really? That is so awesome.

[maayangoestumbling]

Excellent post by Mallory Bower on learning LinkedIn using "old school" techniques -- paper and markers rather than computers. I freaking love this.

[admissionsproblems]

Great day, right? Inside Higher Ed, the Daily Penn… we’re famous, you guys! Some of the tweets and inbox comments were not so loving today, but whatevs. We’re feeling just dandy.

If you didn’t hear about or read what happened, check it out:

Inside Higher Ed critcizes Admission Problems

Blah blah blah from the Daily Penn 

Here’s the quickest synopsis: An admission counselor at UPenn put up excerpts from admission essays on her personal (and private!) Facebook page.

[maayangoestumbling]

You should read the whole damned thing because it's Good Stuff, but two parts that are sticking with me:

With the number of stealth applicants we have today, we all know and recognize that we have never met the majority of our applicants. There really is no reason to write a college essay that borderlines on (or is completely) inappropriate for a complete stranger to read. If a kid chooses to disclose something really personal (to the point where they’d be embarrassed if it was shared), they shouldn’t be including it in a college essay. The essay doesn’t stay sealed in an airtight envelope all the way to your dear admission counselor’s desk, kids. It’s more than likely touched by at least a dozen or so people in this process. And if the office you applied to scans all their applications electronically, your application just became amusement for generations of student workers and admission counselors to come. Use some common sense.

My admissions essays are as public as the world can get. They're on the Oberlin blogs,  both my Oberlin essay and my general common app essay. I vetted my essays first on my own personal blog back when I was in high school. Not because I was worried I would be embarrassed about them, but because I needed a place to talk them through with people who weren't my parents and they were cool pieces of writing I wanted to share.

And secondly, and the reason I even thought about reblogging this is the first place, is that beyond the praise and the criticism, some smart folks have found the light and...

We received 182 new inbox messages today. 151 of them were questions from high school students about essays asking for advice.

That's a measurable level of awesome. You go Admissions Problems. Use your social media for GOOD. 

[maayangoestumbling]

Via Poynter... Great tips for all of our inner writers.

[theverge]

FYI: How Do You Cite a Tweet in an Academic Paper? - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

[hyperallergic]

The Social Ties That Unbind

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of commissioned essays for The World’s First Tumblr…Art Symposium on Saturday, March 9, 2013.

When I sent my first email in the 1990s, the internet was just beginning to hit the mainstream. The idea that we would use the internet to talk to friends we knew offline had yet to take off. Most of the nascent social web culture, from usenet to telnet to AOL chat rooms, consisted of socializing largely with strangers. These strangers might eventually become friends, of course, but they’d start out as strangers in the purest sense of that word. At the outset, you didn’t even know their name, age, location, perhaps not even their gender.

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[casual-isms]

Ma’yaan Plaut, the social media coordinator of Oberlin College, says that explaining why we marched this afternoon is “amplifying cacophony”...

[maayangoestumbling]

For That Laid-Back Ignorance: casual-isms: Ma’yaan Plaut, the social media coordinator of Oberlin…

I apologize for misspelling your name.But I do not believe you want to help or can help anyone in my community. Your statement “sometimes in holding back, even more can be said” proves that you don’t understand what is going on in Oberlin or what needs to be done. Silence does not bring about action. Holding back does not bring about change. More prejudiced incidents have happened since you wrote your response. In Burton, on Saturday, someone wrote “No Niggers” on a bathroom door, “Whites Only” above a drinking fountain, and “Jew Gas Chamber” on the inside of the elevator. Someone got jumped on Cedar Street early Sunday morning. This is not the time to hold back. As a queer, Black woman Oberlin is neither safe nor accepting. It’s important for Oberlin students and prospective students to understand that their safety is in jeopardy. That we pay almost $60,000 to get a education in a hostile atmosphere and receive no help from the administration. As for the administration being a group of individuals, the only individuals who’ve done more than send emails have been the staff of the Multi-Cultural Resource Center. The same staff members who had their space vandalized last week. As for the rest of you, you’re part of the problem—your silence and inaction endangers my community.

[maayangoestumbling]

"In holding back, more can be said" refers to the fact that I am completely listening to what is happening rather than simply amplifying messages without all sides of the story represented. I have personally jumped into the conversation because I wish to know more about what you all believe can be done in this situation and to better inform myself for more discussions ahead and to better prepare for the future. 

For slightly more context, because it is important for my posts here, I, too, attended Oberlin College before beginning to work here following my graduation in 2010. I decided to stay here because of the community I wished to remain connected with and help represent. Not all the days here are good and picture perfect, and know that I am speaking with a bit of perspective, perhaps not lots, of what the Oberlin campus community has experienced over the past few years, and that it is unfortunately not limited to the actions we have seen recently. And when I say I am feeling the actions that move within our campus, I am feeling them as a graduated student who is paying back her loans for attending Oberlin (no small feat, this I know), as an alum who is equally saddened and angry by what is occurring here, and as an administrator who spends much of her day attempting to connect with all audiences associated with Oberlin College (a greater challenge than you can imagine, because Obies are calculated in our choice of discussion and have a healthy skepticism of that which is official). It is a human thing to be able to show weakness, but I admit that I am scared, I am scared for each and every one of you and for myself, because I am never sure what we will next see and hear that comes from unknown aggressors who wish to demonize our identities -- yes, even me and mine, the ones my parents taught my brother and me to be proud of and voice even when I wasn't in a community as accepting as Oberlin. If Oberlin taught me anything, it is that you can not keep Obies quiet if the things we believe in, that we live daily, that we fight for because we know it is the right thing to do, are compromised. 

I will refer to silence again for a moment, not because I feel that silence is strength -- it is not, as a reticence to tackle a problem is condemning that problem to worsen through inaction -- but because what may appear to be silence to you is an undercurrent of discussion that has been ongoing for months. As someone who works in the administrative body at Oberlin College, I can tell you that in no way have we been silent about this, though perhaps there isn't much public display for our discussions. I'm but one person, but I have spent hours of my past week discussing what is happening and what the outcomes can be.

Since you have chosen to engage with me here (and I thank you for that), I would honestly love to know what you believe can and should be done in assistance to our community. Just passing on a series of posts does not solve a problem, nor does saying that we at Oberlin do not tolerate such behavior as the ones we have seen thus far. What actions can be taken so that we are all safer?

[maayangoestumbling]

From the Oberlin blogs:

Know that the actions of those who choose Oberlin are the same actions that must be magnified in the world at large, and that Obies settle for nothing less. When we are hit with intolerance, with disregard for our identities, our thoughts, and our families, we are not quiet. Here at Oberlin, we are developing (or perhaps more accurately, honing) ourselves into the human beings that help change things: the ones who pick themselves up by bootstraps to stand taller, who speak up when voices need to be heard, and who can point at each scar accumulated along the way to proudly share the past as we move into the future.

Read more.

[maayangoestumbling]

From the Oberlin College Webteam blog:

I say time and time again that in the role of community manager that listening is the foundation of better understanding, but at times, just listening is not enough. As a community manager, you are a part of the community, you take on the feelings, statements, and thoughts of your community to better understand and make decisions. This is a double-edged sword, one that helps along the bleeding edge of a story but also nicks a few cuts along the way.

Read more.