3. As part of its mission to promote enhanced citizenship, the Bob Graham Center
for Public Service at the University of Florida embarked on a project that would
• engage those under 30 in political
discourse on critical issues,
• focus on consensus building for
the betterment of public policy,
and
• create a platform for civil debate.
4.
5. Leverage Engagement
Youth are heavily engaged in digital media. We should consider how we
leverage that engagement to promote civic and political engagement.
Media Literacy
Increasingly, civic and political life is occurring online. In order to prepare
young people to be civic actors, we must prepare them to be effective and
thoughtfully engaged with digital media.
6. Digital Media Supports Civic Engagement
• Eliminates barriers to entry
• Brings light to the ideas of the
• Combats top-down control of people
content
• Increases public engagement
• Creates networking
opportunities between those • Serves as a virtual space for
who might not otherwise meet assembly
9. Strategies for promoting civil discourse
• Allow users to access and share information on social
media channels such as Facebook.
• Affiliate comments with pictures of users.
• Allow folks to rate the constructive nature of others’
responses.
• Ask people to concisely defend their stance in 140
characters.
• Involve students in all stages of development.
12. Making for a more user-friendly
and engaging experience
• Eliminate barriers to entry
• Utilize modern technology
• Move to a binary response (“Yes” or “No”) set
• Provide recognizable language (“Like” & “Flag”) instead of a rating
system for comments
• Make comments more readily available from both sides
• Allow for back-and-forth discussion
• Take a mobile approach
24. If we’re honest...
• Lack of opinion and/or knowledge of
the issue as a barrier to participation
• Engagement with other people, but
not the issue
• Loaded and nuanced questions
• Seduced to write, but not to read
• Feels like a survey
28. We like to help
Shelby Taylor | Communications Director
220 Pugh Hall | PO Box 112030 | Gainesville, FL 32611
Ph 352-273-1086 | Fax. 352-846-1576
Email: sheladk9@ufl.edu
Emma K. Humphries, Ph.D. | Assistant in Citizenship
220 Pugh Hall | PO Box 112030 | Gainesville, FL 32611
Ph 352-846-1575 | Fax. 352-846-1576
Email: ekhumphries@ufl.edu
Editor's Notes
The Wall is a new experiment in using digital media to encourage young people (18-29) to engage in constructive dialogue around public policy issues.
Florida, more than any other state, is in desperate need of a revolutionary tool for civic discussions, especially for our Millenials. Here’s why: Florida Millennials have the depressing distinction of being the most disengaged group in one of the most disengaged states in the nation. In terms of volunteerism, voter turnout, and other measures of civic engagement, Florida has consistently ranked near the bottom among the 50 states. Within the state, Millenials are less engaged by a measure of 2 to 23 percentage points than those aged 30 and over (who, again, are generally less engaged than the nation).
In December 2010, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation awarded a three-year, three-million dollar grant to the Bob Graham Center to support its pioneering approach to prepare University of Florida (UF) students to be informed, skilled and engaged citizens. One of the five activities outlined in the three-year Knight Foundation grant was to build our electronic “Civil Debate Wall”
When it comes to digital media, many doubt its civic value. We at the Graham Center are energetically, if not naively, optimistic that there is a lot of potential here. We know young people are using digital media and we know digital media have the potential to support civic engagement. This reality calls for the increased importance of teaching media literacy, which we take seriously.
Individuals who once felt that they could not participate in political conversations now have the ability to express themselves and their opinions online. These tools help citizens to report on real news, bypassing censorship. The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics. Politicians will are being confronted with ideas that are from “the people” thanks to social media. Politicians are being forced to address specific problems that the public is concerned with. This increased interaction online is beneficial to both parties because it allows the general public to feel more engaged, but also gives politicians a better understanding of what the people stand for.
Can we think of any recent examples of the power of social media and online activism to influence public policy?
Does digital media always support civil discourse? The downside: self selection of “friends”—like minded people congregating in homogeneous groups. General sentiment that contemporary forms of communication are driving people to extreme points of view—constantly having ideas reinforced. The anonymity of social media also enables people to express their thoughts, opinions and ideas without any personal accountability—can lead to harsh attacks.
Several strategies emerged based on what we know about social media, digital communication and also grounded in the literature on discussion-based best practices.
Director Ann Henderson brought ideas to Jake Barton, founder and principal of Local Projects, an award-winning media design firm for museums and public spaces--lead exhibition designers for the National September 11th Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center. Other projects Local Projects has worked on include interactive design for StoryCorps, media design for the National Museum of American Jewish History and media design for the Official New York City Visitors Information Cent.
The prototype gave us the ability to test strategies. Factors evaluated included: multiple response answer set, the efficiency of asking for written responses, the level of garnered participation, the value of rating the constructive nature of comments and the ability to share comments across social media platforms.
After testing we came away with several ideas on how to make the interaction more user-friendly and engaging.
Chose an interactive configuration which allowed for serendipitous conversation—local projects has seen examples of beneficial side conversations in the Jewish museum of history.
We administered several hours of user testing using a one screen configuration to fine tune the interaction and kiosk design before moving forward with the full five screen build out.
Give usability statistics. Click on picture and it will go to a page to play the video.
Give website analytics statistics and discuss how the interface mirrors that of the kiosks in Pugh so that all users have similar experiences with the wall. Launch website to actually click through.
The next step is the development of the mobile app. Mobile web is more popular than mags, books, newspapers combined. We know that 2/3 of Americans get their news on mobile devices and if we can provide people the opportunity to participate from the same place they get their news, we come closer to establishing ubiquitous access. Cool video on mobile statistics if we have time.
The future of the wall: An application also gives us the ability to put ipads at bus stops, Starbucks and even other universities---interesting to see the difference in opinions between FIU in Miami and UF in Gainesville. We would like to see this before the presidential election. We also have and will continue to use the wall as a springboard for discussion during our public events. Smiley & West example during launch.
The PR value: This has been well received and it has garnered a great deal of attention for our center and ALL the work that we do. It gives us the ability to showcase the importance of training civic leaders and fostering civic discussion on college campuses. We hope that as a result our mission becomes an institutional priority at UF.
Over the past five months, we have been able to observe participation on The Wall and draw a handful of important insights regarding the ways in which individuals engage The Wall. So let’s talk about those ways – the phenomenon, if you will – and what it means for the future of The Wall.
Students have reported, and likewise, we have observed them, taking “a political moment” out of their busy and otherwise non-political day to engage The Wall. In this way, students might not be impacting their communities or affecting change, but they are pausing to consider important social and political issues and to discuss them with their peers. This is not insignificant, especially because students also report feeling more engaged with other people (although not necessarily the issue). Considering the “civil” aims of The Wall, this finding is very pleasing to us.
As Shelby discussed, a major design decision was to limit response options to Yes or No. In this way, participation in The Wall has the potential to feel more adversarial, more like a debate than a civil discussion. That said, we find that students mollify their responses and perhaps even express a third opinion – a “maybe” or something of the sort – using the 140-character comment box. In this way, The Wall appears to encourage civil debate. In fact, we find that participants rarely use the comment box to express a more extreme position than the Yes or No option would otherwise allow them to.
Students report feeling very conscious about spelling and the grammatical accuracy of what they write on The Wall. This is very interesting, especially when we consider the amount of spelling, grammatical, and typographic errors we observe on social media sites. One would think that, while not anonymous, our participation on The Wall is less likely to be observed by those we know than say a status update on our Facebook page. However, when we post a status update, we are not usually expressing an opinion on a controversial public issue (although I suspect those in this room do that more often than the general public). Is that why students are more conscious about what they write on The Wall? I suspect that is the case, although at this point, I cannot be certain.
