Justin E. Fogle's Learning Journal

I will be moving this blog over to justinefogle.com in the next day or so. Please subscribe to that blog.

Breathe....

Empowerment is a one word summary for this class.   I have dabbled in social media but not to the point that I did in “Using the Social Web for Social Change”. 

There are a slew of us in this class, I can think of at least 10 people who have found the connection to the camera and video work to be a great tool for change and will plan to carry it forward into more of their life.  I thought a couple great youtube posts would be a good way to recap the quarter.

I got an email from Carol letting me know that the comments section of my blog were not accessible. As an avid experimentator of technology and new items, I grabbed a cheeky blackberry skin and threw it on the blog though it looks like it did not work as well as I had hoped. I thought that the skins that people put together would be able to work well but I learned to thoroughly check the functionality of the template before going completely live. The skin is now a basic skin where it will change later on.

Please let me know your thoughts about the video I posted a couple days ago...

After another session where I was really thinking that I was not all there in the Brand, I have revisited this.  With a strong connection to my social life (which I start to miss when at BGI), I came up with the following brand.  It is very close to the simplicity that I am working to achieve.


Compassionate Visionary
Social Connector
Building, Transportation, and Technology Geek
Real Estate Addict

I have been frustrated by Delicious. I do not want another inbox to check so I figured out how to use the RSS feed from my delicious inbox to go into Google Reader. I am now a happy camper! One less place to see what people are posting! YAY!!! I highly recommend this to simplify your life. If you need directions, see this video (it is not great so if someone else has a better one, that would be great).

Video: http://www.associatedcontent.com/video/12866/subscribing_to_rss_feeds_on_firefox.html

This intensive was above and beyond my favorite so far. Connectivity for the Social Web learnings into the other parts of our schooling.

Marketing class and the social web class are a great compliment to each other and in my mind, essential for our learning of how to build ourselves either within a company or as a company. Brand and the pitch are fundamental parts of having strength and conviction in our roles. This class has given me a strength to question my own convictions and ideas of self brand going into the entreprenuership classes.

I have bounced back and forth on my own brand coming back to the one I have written before. It is listed below:
Compassionate Visionary at many levels.
Individualistic with Cooperative Values.
Energetic and Inspirational.
Technology Geek (added today)

I continue to be amazed at the videos that others produced and hope that my works will be on par with videos like Karen Goat's and Justin Tilson's.

I am still struck at the simplicity to which we were asked to pitch a Social Change Project. When we were put to have the answers down, we were running around figuring them out but now, it seems so simple. I am working with Desiree Rajee, Allen Bertstein, and Zachery Twist on a BGI Diversity Video and really looking forward to seeing if we, or even someone in our class can get theirs to go viral!

Pitching required us to answer the following questions:

What is the general problem we are trying to solve? Increase awareness and amount of diversity in BGI

What is the specific audience?Funders

What is the behavior we want to change?Increase Diversity and scholarship opportunities

What are the barriers to change and how are we going to break them? Bringing the discussion of diversity to the forefront of the conversation.

What is our channel? Video basis, approx. 3 min.

Who is on my team? Desiree - Producer / Director , Allen - Editor, Justin Fogle - Graphics / Animation, Zachery - Jack of all trades

Can't wait to see how this turns out!

Gosh, it can take quite some time to boil one's self into a brand that they can bring to the world. I looked at many things and realize that many of my values and personal writings come from my core values that I poked into at Channel Rock and now am writing about now.

My Core Values:
Community
Passion
Creativity

Bringing those to my own personal brand along with the tagging and where I am in life, I have come up with the following:

Compassionate Visionary at many levels.
Individualistic with Cooperative Values.
Energetic and Inspirational.

I have been wondering how to organize the 30+ required and suggested reading links that one class has per week. So in spirit of these new tools that I am learning, why not use delicious to tag my bookmarks so I can organize them easily.

Here is how I did it:
tag with the name of the course: "bgimgt566sx"
tag with the week of the reading: "week1" for example, the following weeks as "week2", "week3", etc.
tag with "required", "optional", or "suggested". I am still not sure the difference between optional and suggested but our professor chose them so I followed suit.
tag with "readings" as to find them easier

Looking back, I would tag all videos with "videos", pictures with "pictures", and others with more descriptive information. As this was my first take on organizing, it was quite intriguing.

Please take a look at them: http://delicious.com/apeacefulworld/bgimgt566sx+readings

(testing the "send to" functionality for Google Reader)

Teaching "Using the Social Web for Social Change" at BGI.edu: "

Starting next week I will be teaching a course at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute on the topic of "Using the Social Web for Social Change".

BGI offers an MBA and Certificate program for professionals to learn how to build enterprises that are financially successful, socially responsible and environmentally sustainable. Students have to learn everything that they'd have to learn in an ordinary MBA program — profit and loss, how to read a balance sheet, business plan creation, macroeconomics, quantitative analysis, corporate strategy, how to manage and motivate people, and a basic understanding of all the components of business such as operations, marketing, distribution, sales, etc. In addition, BGI student have to learn green and sustainability topics — the triple-bottom line, environmental accounting, sustainable energy, social justice, systems thinking, organization change, right livelihood and much more.

That broad a curriculum doesn't give students a lot of room for electives, but the MBA program allows for students to take one 3 credit hour course. This year students can choose from three: one course on social responsibility, a second course on climate change and carbon trading, and my course on the social web.

The BGI pedagogy (a new term I have just learned, meaning "teaching method") is a mixed hybrid of online sessions along with a number of very intensive in-person classroom sessions. This allows the MBA student to continue working while taking classes in either a 2-year or 3-year program.

Students kick off their BGI experience at Channel Rock on Cortes Island in British Columbia, where the live for a week at an off-the-grid wilderness retreat, where they get the chance to experience and practice sustainability. Over the course of the year students and faculty meet in intensive classroom sessions for a 4-day weekend once a month at the IslandWood environmental learning center on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, Washington. Between sessions, the classes utilize a variety of online distance-learning technologies such as Elluminate to support student learning.

I like this hybrid format because it fits my ideals of group formation — bonding and team building work best in the immersive, in-person experience, yet the online technologies allow students to have greater flexibility, deeper focus, and more control over their engagement while remote. BGI offers students both.

When the class is complete, I plan to offer the syllabus, course plan, presentations, etc. online as open courseware, so that other schools can use these materials as a basis for future classes. In the meantime, expect to see some more posts here over the next few months.

It is amazing how the building market is changing. I have watched the NW MLS (Multiple Listing Service) get a section for Green Building Certifications and now the Appraisers are getting on board with quantifying how much a "green" home is worth more than a standard construction home. The problems are immense though.

Who do you trust?
Who is financing out there? Are they giving to your community along with getting your money?
What does it mean to be green built? Built Green? LEED?
What is the ROI on these buildings?

I am delving into these issues at my new blog.
whatisgreenrealestate.blogspot.com

At the first Intensive of the Fall 2009 Quarter at BGI, we at the "Social Web for Social Change" Class did an exercise in tagging ourselves. We laid out what we thought of ourselves, what were our key characteristics and then the fun part...

WE TAGGED EVERYONE IN CLASS!

So we took those tags along with our own tags and looked them over to create tags that showed who we are. I ended up with the following 3 tags (created from the other tags):

• Engaged at many levels
• Actively compassionate
• Creatively and analytically balanced.

It is an interesting time in technology these days. I am pondering getting the Motorola Cliq with MotoBLUR which comes out in a couple weeks. It links up Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace with no logins. Would I actually get more done? Would I be more connected to others, or less? This is my own personal question that I ponder day by day. Would a piece of technology be a benefit or drawback to my life? Does the Friendbar on Firefox just distract you from the work that you need to do in cataloging your delicious bookmarks?

One recent dilemma has been over a change of relationship status for myself (and my fiancee).

When is it appropriate to say that you are engaged on Facebook? Do you Tweet it first? Do I call all of my friends and tell them or let them find out the new way through Facebook?
I remember changing my status to single after breaking up with my last girlfriend and it was horrible, I got messages from everywhere about it. I later changed from single to nothing and all of a sudden, a flurry of more emails flew in. So where do you draw the line about your relationship and its social web life?

I personally believe that telling those who keep in touch with you in person is critical and all of the others can find out through either Facebook, rumor (which actually is far more fun) or another method.

I sit here, a day after the intensive with 7 tabs open juggling the world of getting my delicious tabs, Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, Blogger and a couple other sites to get it syncronized.

I added the friendbar just before I left for Turkey and it was a true life saver in updating those in my life. I could easily post an update without having to spend time logging into Twitter nor Facebook, soon I hope we can get a link in for the ning.org sites as well such that my life can get even smaller.

Delicious is quite powerful and at this time, I am feeling a bit novice but intrigued by the complex tagging system that you can do, which surprisingly is similar to iPhoto's tagging system with smart albums. I am glad to see this similarity with the simple method of cataloging information that we have.