Amanda's Study Lab

To begin I apologize for being 5 minutes late to the study lab.  After doing the previous night's readings and then walking into the class discussion type setting, I at first assumed we were simply going to have a peer to peer conversation about the material.  Then once I sat down and was handed a fake smart phone and saw the deck of cards I assumed we were going to play a game.  The best description of this study lab was somewhere in between these two assumptions.  I liked how we were doing a mock study on a future Boulder fire as that is a personal subject to nearly everybody in the class.  At first I was really interested in trying to answer the questions on the card as if I was a PIO.  I felt that the first hour of conversation went great, we discussed two promising ideas based on twitter and mash-up mapping.  I also enjoyed hearing the story about the phony tweeter who made false claims that people were trapped in the fire.  Although the conversation broke into a tangent then, I liked learning about the future and how social media plans to overcome challenges such as misleading tweeters.  Eventually, the questions on the card became redundant on methods of using social media.  It was smart of Amanda to have us stop drawing cards, and instead just open the discussion up to a broader sense of how we would do things if we were the PIO.  I am not sure if Amanda got what she wanted from us, but I was able to take a few things away from the study.  In particular I learned from one of the questions dealing with press releases.  The original release in an emergency is typed out in detail and is much longer than Twitter's allowed 140 characters.  This dilemma made me think about how people got their news and in which format.  This got me thinking about how press releases will be more instantaneous and brief in the future. For example, in the future data will be represented visually in an easy to digest format that is so quick to comprehend that the typed press release will be a thing of the past.  If I had any advice for Amanda I would say the cell phones are unnecessary, I understand the tangibility of having the internet in your hands, but I think with today's technology we assume to always have access to the mobile web.  In closing I enjoyed the study and hope that Amanda gained some useful information from our class.