Last week I was in the west coast and during my runs there I got the chance to attend one of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University led by BJ Fogg, you can get more information about Persuasive Technoloy here.  Stanford was the first and may be the only university to do a class on facebook, more information about that here. I recorded my observations of the whole session (to bad I coudn't tweet the whole session since I had no internet access):

I notice that I’m the only one using a PC, this is Mac country. I count 9 Macs out of 10 computers here.

The group is quite diverse with 16 people in attendance, there’s a Japanese student  called Nao whose logo has been selected by one of the largest newspapers, an Italian student working with robot technology for detection of mines who seems to have a very protective relationship with his Mac Powerbook. The leader of the group BJ points out that a new book The Psychology of Facebook is going to be out later on during the year, September to be precise.  I definitely want to get my hand on this book, the book will have over 400 reviews, He mentions that some people have requested to review at least 9 chapters.

A class on metrics and analytics, studying how to measure all this persuasive technology, might be done at some point. The approach towards imparting knowledge is quite interesting, they talk about coming up with a class later on during the fall semester, all the educational content is based on what’s happening around us, if it happened this month it can be part of a class in 2 weeks or the next semester.

Leila begins to talk about the Facebook conference that happened on Wednesday, she highlights the platform as a key point. I wish I could have attended but it was sold out weeks in advance.Later on Nao takes as through an animation, the animation consists of people in a queue being served, at some point one person cuts the line and that becomes the focus of the animation. The animation is in two views, one from the view of the person serving and the other one from the view of the person who gets cut in the line. An interesting approach to academics I must say.

Scenario

Create a website, and at a specific time customize the website to achieve something like increased usage, engagement, response in real time. Can this be done?

One thing I found very interesting is that the current affairs of the world can be incorporated into a curriculum so quickly and become part of a course very quickly. I think this makes education more relevant when it attempts to tackle current issues and trends.