Page 20 - October 2010

ACOUSTICS, THE INTERNET, AND YOU
Micah R. Shepherd, Scott P. Porter, Randy M. Carbo, and Daniel J. Domme
The Graduate Program in Acoustics, The Pennsylvania State University State College, Pennsylvania 16801
“The acoustics community must find ways to build modern outreach strategies on new technologies so that students are able to actively and passively interact with the world of acoustics.”
Introduction
In 2006, Time magazine made a sur- prising pick for their annual person
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of the year award: You. The choice
of “You” was a symbol of the aggregate contributions to the information age made by millions of individuals using the internet. This online community of collaborators has developed on a scale that has never before existed, effective- ly transforming the web into a tool for collecting and sharing small amounts of information from millions of people around the world.
So what does this mean for
acoustics outreach? While there are already acoustics-related websites and online applications in place, we feel that many aspects of technology and the internet have not been used by the acoustics community to their full potential. The acoustics community could make better use of technology and the internet to promote acoustics to the rising “Millennial” gen- eration as well as to provide an expanded experience for Acoustical Society members.
Promoting acoustics to the Millennials is of particular interest to us, since we are members of this generation. Millennials (as they are often called, but sometimes alter- nately labeled as Generation Y or the Echo Boomers) are best characterized by having a fundamentally different perspec- tive on technology than any previous generation. With birth- dates ranging from 1982 to about 2001, most Millennials do not remember a time when there was not a personal com- puter in their home.2
A recent Acoustics Today article by Busch-Vishniac and West calls for attracting more students to acoustics, correctly arguing that our response should be to promote undergradu- ate acoustics education.3 There is, however, an additional means for outreach and attracting students that we feel must be discussed: the internet. In today’s world, the internet is ubiquitous and its effective use is at the core of the Millennial generation’s way of life. The acoustics community must find ways to build modern outreach strategies based on new tech- nologies so that others are able to actively and passively inter- act with the world of acoustics. An added benefit of improv- ing online resources and communications for up-and-com- ing students is that the existing body of acousticians can use and enjoy them as well.
There are many reasons why we feel that a strong Internet presence is valuable. First, the modern day has brought about new avenues of communication through wire- less and high-speed internet, cellular technology, and portable computing, giving rise to a culture of hyper-connec- tivity. Second, there is an expectation for instant access to
information. When confronted with obstacles that make finding information even a minor inconvenience—fractured resources, wait times, or excessive navi- gation—many people now abandon oth- erwise useful resources in favor of more readily (i.e., instantly) available materi- als. Third, keeping up with the times is extremely important for attracting new students and members. Millennials are starting to enter graduate school and the work force and they expect that relevant academic and professional resources
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will be modern and up-to-date. Finally,
there are currently many online
resources which are
allowing for easy adoption by our community. Establishing a centralized online acoustics presence that utilizes these resources is the main focus of this article.
Because of the sheer number of online resources avail- able, it is helpful to sort them into broad categories: informa- tional resources, multimedia, and social networking. In the following sections, we will consider each topic in detail and describe how these ideas can work together to promote acoustics. Then the discussion turns to focus on connecting these various web-based resources together to form a unified presence for acoustics online and create a platform for effec- tive outreach.
Informational resources
The amount of information available on the internet has
exploded in the last decade. Increasingly, this information is
being made available in non-traditional formats, such as
wikis, e-books, and online courses/tutorials. The rise in pop-
ularity of electronic informational resources is due largely to
the enhanced features inherent in electronic media such as
searchability and hyperlinks. Features like these enable
“power browsing” and “horizontal information seeking,”
behaviors in which the user harvests information quickly by
skimming materials on multiple sources in a rapid, disjoint-
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ed manner. Web users have come to expect features like
hyperlinks and browser tabs to allow them to gather infor- mation efficiently. Web-based resources play a vital role in the lives of Millennials and are the de-facto means for obtain- ing information, including basic and advanced math and sci- ence. In this section, we discuss three web-based resources that host information on acoustics: Wikipedia, e-books, and academic journals.
Currently, the largest and best known web-based refer- ence is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collabora- tive, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-
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profit Wikimedia Foundation. At present; it has over 16 mil-
well-established and extremely popular,
Acoustics, the Internet, and You 19