Special Presentation: Understanding Social Comfort to Improve Social Tool Adoption

eXtension has arranged a special presentation by a 'big name' speaker - Thomas Vander Wal.

If you are interested in using social media, this should be a good session to attend.

March 24, 2010
at 2:00-3:30 PM Eastern Time

http://connect.extension.iastate.edu/Learn

There are three elements around social comfort to keep in mind when selecting and using social computing tools to interact with others: Social comfort with people; Social comfort with tools; and Social comfort with subject matter. These components of social comfort are factors that cause unease with most people outside the early adopters and those with technical ease with these tools and services. Thomas Vander Wal will discuss each of these three components of social comfort to help move social tools more toward mainstream adoption.

Thomas Vander Wal is Principal & Senior Consultant of InfoCloud Solutions, Inc. (http://infocloudsolutions.com/about.php) In Thomas' more than 20 years as a professional in information services and web he has worked in many industries and in many roles. He has always been the problem solver and the person who can see the big picture and put it into details to get it accomplished.

Thomas coined folksonomy in 2004 as part of his interest with how a novel approach to tagging aids a person refinding information and is also used to augment other information structuring methods so to help other people find information. Thomas also presents and provides training at many conferences, workshops, and in-house events. Thomas presents and leads discussions at many events across the U.S. and Europe on a broad range of topics including: folksonomy, Personal InfoCloud, social software, information architecture, design, web standards, ubiquitous computing (ubicom), tagging, and designing for use and reuse of information across devices.

This session will be broadcast and use your computers speakers for audio, not your phone. Audience interaction will include opportunities to use built-in chat capabilities. Plan to join the session 5 minutes before the starting time. The session will be held at 2:00 Eastern Time (1:00p.m. CT, 12:00p.m. MT, 11:00 a.m. PT, 10:00a AT; 8:00a HT) (for all Extension).

Five (5) minutes before the announced time of a session, go to http://connect.extension.iastate.edu/Learn Enter as a Guest. When prompted, enter your name followed by your institution. (ex: Beth Raney, Penn State).