Citations from Edelman's New Media Academic Summit

I spoke today at the panel on transparency at Edelman's New Media Academic Summit. Ben Boyd was the moderator and Ellen Miller from the Sunlight Foundation was my fellow panelist.

Reviewing some of the #nmas10 tweets from the audience, I figured I should provide some links for the anecdotes I mentioned:
Special thanks to Dr. Val Jones of Better Health for getting me involved with this group.

Warm impermanence

I'm back from SAEM's Annual Meeting, and catching up on a boatload of emails and unread items in my RSS feed. Something's gotta give when social media use goes into high gear, but one of the things I missed was my own article in EPMonthly on using technology to keep current. Kind of embarrassing.

Anyway, some of the resources I highlighted were the same that Graham Walker mentioned in his comprehensive review of E-learning for EM. We're definitely entering a golden age for electronic resources in our specialty, and the tools to archive this material and make it quickly accessible are also coming along nicely. It's also reassuring, when others point out the mental risks from internet info consumption, that I've met so many accomplished and sharp people taking the plunge into this new media. What is it with early adopters, anyway? This quote comes closest to explaining the phenomenon, among any I've read:
I find that the early adopter mentality is widely misunderstood: Journalists going for a sociological angle on the people in line for iPads, for example, focus on a desire for status or attention, or to be first on the block. They completely miss the point. They don't understand that the desire is for the thing itself and for what it can do; that we imagined this device before it was announced; that we're constantly bumping up against the limitations of what's available today; and that when these things finally appear in stores, we say "At last!" And then we buy them, and use them, and immediately get frustrated with its shortcomings and start waiting for the day when the next model comes out.
This text was waiting for my in my RSS reader, and when I came across it I naturally tweeted the link, as well as added it to Evernote, before reprinting it here.