Social Media + Interactive Digital Wall = Civil Debate at U. of Florida

By Tanya Roscorla

ON JANUARY 16, 2012 , Converge

University of Florida students share their opinions on civic issues through a new interactive digital tool called The Wall. | Photo courtesy of University of Florida

In the Florida Gubernatorial Election of 2010, only 8 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds voted. 

"Eight percent means that this generation has no voice with our political leadership," said Ann Henderson, director of the Bob Graham Center for Public Service at the University of Florida. "That's a problem to me."

This generation of millenials doesn't participate in democracy the way previous generations did. Their version of participation is reading blogs, sending stories they like to friends or watching "The Colbert Report."

While nothing's wrong with these actions, their communities need them to participate in more traditional forms of civic engagement, including voting, going to city council meetings and volunteering, Henderson said. Civic engagement fundamentally means they care about their community, whether it's city, state or global.

With a new digital platform called The Wall, the Bob Graham Center for Public Service hopes to engage students in civil debates about economy, politics, and domestic and foreign policy. In this experiment, the center will find out if digital communication and social media will help change the behavior of 18- to 29-year-olds.

How The Wall works

On The Wall, students answer yes or no questions, defend their response in 140 characters or less and reply to other students' answers. Users submit questions, but a student policy council selects relevant ones, said Shelby Taylor, digital and communications director for the center.

By logging in with Facebook or an email address, students join the debate and provide their first name as well as their photo. Interactive media designer Jake Barton from the firm Local Projects created the software for The Wall and insisted that students should post a photo. Otherwise, he told Henderson it would leave the door wide open for inappropriate comments. So far, the council hasn't had to remove any comments.

Since the design process began with a three-year, $3 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the policy council has provided feedback.

"For the project to succeed, we felt that the students needed to love it, the students needed to buy into it, and in order to do that they needed to be involved in it's development," Taylor said.

While students access The Wall from mobile and other computing devices, they also stop by Pugh Hall, the home of the Bob Graham Center for Public Service. On one of the walls, five 46-by-26-inch touch-screen flat panels allow students to interact and join the debate. So far, about 100 students have joined the debate.

The search for consensus

By emphasizing civil debate, the center encourages students to engage someone in respectful dialogue and look for solutions as well as common ground.

During the testing phase in October and November 2011, students answered the question, "Can our country afford foreign aid in a time of economic downturn in our own economy?" The answers represented two extremes:

• The United States should never involve itself in the affairs of other nations.
• The United States is a leader of the free world, cares about spreading its values and should always be involved.

But a word cloud showed where students found consensus in their different answers. In situations including the earthquake in Haiti and the tsunami in Japan, most of them said the United States should provide aid.

"We're never going to be able to get folks who always think we should be looking for ways to help other nations together with people who say we never should," Henderson said. "What we can do is look for the places where we agree."