Faculty

Isn’t this headline quite a teaser?

I stand by it though as this is also a good way to look at the Edu Blogger Scholarship Contest.

As I’ve explained on this blog a few weeks ago, I’m managing this contest targeted to edu bloggers. It’s open to the “usual suspects” of the higher ed blogosphere (you know who you are – and if you aren’t registered yet, hope you’ll do it before the deadline next Tuesday), but also to any of the bloggers writing for your institution.

The only 3 requirements to enter this contest are 1) to write a post about online education or education online, 2) to include the contest badge in the entry and 3) to fill out the form available on the contest page.

While the contest is sponsored by Online College, a website about online education, these posts written for the contest don’t even have to be in favor of online education – and can also help promote what’s going on at YOUR institution.

• If your student bloggers think that studying on campus is the only way to get an education, they can discuss their opinion in their contest post.
• If some of your faculty bloggers teach online classes at your institution and want to write about their experience in a post, they can enter the contest.
• If some of your staff members passionate about academic technology want to blog about the future of education in this online world, they can submit an entry for the contest as well.

What I’m trying to say is that there is plenty that can be written about education online or online education, and I’m sure the folks blogging for your institution would love to get an opportunity to win one of the 3 scholarships.

Think it’s not even worth trying because of the numbers of A-list bloggers already entered in the contest?
Even if I find it hard to understand, as of this writing, we only have a dozen entries – which means that with 3 prizes to win, any interested edu blogger has a very high probability (we’re not even talking about chances) to grab at least $500.

I know most edu bloggers don’t do it for the money (hey, if we were we would be blogging about something else), but I would really love to see a bit more entries for this contest, you know, just to keep things interesting for the jury.

So, go read the rules on the Edu Blogger Scholarship Contest page. Share this post with your bloggers or go write your own entry if you’re a blogger.

The deadline is next Tuesday – March 17.

Note from Karine: This year, I’ve asked all the eduWeb speakers working in universities/colleges to share in 140 words or less the biggest take-away from their presentation or table talk. If you’ve attended this session, feel free to weigh in by posting a comment, a question or a suggestion.

SOLSTICE is a model for ‘intelligent deployment of technologies’ involving ‘New Academic Teamwork’ grounded in multi-professional pedagogic design approaches.

The dialogue is characteristically:

• Between members of New Academic Teams
• Constructively aligned (Learning-Teaching-Assessment-Evaluation, Research)
• Bespoke Tailored to enhance learning (through alignment of Purpose (P = Learning) with Audience (A = Learners) to determine the Form (F= of Technology Deployment)
• Enhancement and dissemination focused
• Informed by teaching and learning approaches utilising higher order cognitive processing approaches and language interactions.

This organizing ‘P+A ⇋F’ algorithm is the mechanism for focusing dialogue for design and research in all SOLSTICE activities and is related to notions of active learning and pedagogies associated with dialogue and construction of knowledge. Activities are informed by, and generative of, research and scholarship across the P, A and F dimensions.

Note from Karine: This year, I’ve asked all the eduWeb speakers working in universities/colleges to share in 140 words or less the biggest take-away from their presentation or table talk. If you’ve attended this session, feel free to weigh in by posting a comment, a question or a suggestion.

Academic transparency is becoming more important in the shifting tides of higher education. But our most knowledgeable and exciting faculty tend to be among our most technically resistant.

How can you market your academics excellence online, if all the evidence is locked in paperbinders or in print journals?

There isn’t a one size fits all prescription, we’ve found a tiered approach works nicely.

For technophobic faculty, for instance, we use podcasts to capture stories that make them come to life, for example a biologist tells a story of drinking with Jack Kerouac. His podcast remains among our top listened to and students I’ve spoken with said they took his course after hearing the podcast because they could tell the course wasn’t going to be boring.

Note from Karine: This year, I’ve asked all the eduWeb speakers working in universities/colleges to share in 140 words or less the biggest take-away from their presentation or table talk. If you’ve attended this session, feel free to weigh in by posting a comment, a question or a suggestion.

Here are the main “take-aways” from this session

Faculty’s New Role in Marketing

• Faculty will become more involved in marketing
• Faculty will be held more accountable for their programs

Marketing Shift

• End to mass media advertising as we know it
• Today’s consumer is in control of what they look for and when

Integrated Marketing

• Marketing is more than ads
• Need to analyze academic program and services
• Not the number of inquiries, it’s what you do with them
• Define and communicate how you are different
• Career services can differentiate you

Interactive Strategy

• You must engages inquirers in the process
• Your website content must be meaningful and searchable
• Relationships with potential students matter

Technology is a Tool, Not a Savior

• Not the tool, but how your use it
• Use familiar technology consumer knows (e.g. Google, YouTube)
• Google Ads Words provides affordable options with real data

Lessons Learned

• No silver bullet to increase enrollment.
• Growth takes time
• No overnight successes

Reach 25 million people via podcasting???

Ok, there is a bit of marketing hype in the title of this post, but I got your attention – right?

Besides, it’s not all hype since this upcoming 3-webinar series by Higher Ed Experts includes a session about iTunes U, Apple’s free audio and video streaming hosting service – with strings attached though – provided to some institutions such as MIT, Yale, Duke, Bowdoin College and NJIT.

If there are some plans at your institution to start a podcasting program for marketing or academic purposes, this series scheduled on November 6, 7 and 8 will help you get started on the technical and promotional aspects in no time especially if you invite all the parties involved in your project.

Your $150 registration fee will cover for a group – as long as you use a single computer connected to an LCD projector – AND a free on-demand access to the recording for every staff member working at your institution the week after the live event.

You can register online by Friday at www.higheredexperts.com/podcasting

Here’s the program:

• November 6, 2007 1PM-2PM ET
  Podcasting 101: How to record and produce your podcasts with ease
  Micah Ovadia, Digital Designer at the University of Cincinnati and Author of “PoducateMe, Pratical Solutions for Podcasting in Education,” will tell you what you need to know to get your institution started with podcasting. He will share a simple plan to get your institution ready to plan, record, produce and publish its first podcasts in 30 days.
• November 7, 2007 1PM-2PM ET
  Give voice to your recruiting efforts: how to engage prospective students and their parents with podcasts
  Dennis Miller, director of marketing and public relations at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania, will explain how podcasts can become powerful tools to engage students and their parents. He will share best practices and good tips to make sure your podcasts found their audience.
• November 8, 2007 1PM-2PM ET
  To be or not to be an iTunes U(niversity)? Get the scoop from an insider
  Ken Ronkowitz, Web Manager at NJIT, will explain what it takes to sign, plan and implement iTunes U for your institution. He will also share tips and tricks to optimize your presence and avoid pitfalls.

A while ago, LinkedIn, the social networking website targeted to professionals, launched a feature allowing members to ask open questions to the members of their network (their direct connections as well as the connections of their connections).

On several occasions, I’ve seen questions from reporters or freelancers looking for sources pop up in this section of my LinkedIn homepage (I do have a few connections in the media industry so that might also explain why I see them on a regular basis).

However, a post written by Penelope Trunk, “10 Ways journalists can use LinkedIn,”, confirms this trend by the type of advice it gives:

5. Find an expert fast
The advanced search feature is the most powerful tools you can use on LinkedIn. You can search for any combination of keywords, job title, company, location, industry, and you can sort by “degrees away from you” to find people close to you in your network. This is a great way to find experts in almost any field or subject matter. You can also track down executives at companies.
[...]
7. Get responses to queries from non-PR types
Often, if you send a query to a place like PRLeads, you get mostly public relations people answering you. This works fine in most cases, but sometimes you need something different – for example a quote from a type of person who would not typically hire a publicist. LinkedIn’s Answers service allows you to ask questions to the network and get answers from a wide range of people. Answers are tied to the professional profile of the person who responded so you can quickly assess credibility and determine whether to contact the person.

Obviously, you should suggest this move to your experts who are used to deal with the media as you risk to be kept out of the loop.

If you are in charge of PR or media relations at your institution should also set up a profile and develop your own LinkedIn network. This will help editors, reporters or freelancers, who have started to use the social networking for their research, find you more easily.

Are you on LinkedIn? How do you use it?

While more and more universities and colleges are looking into the opportunities offered by the third-party social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook or by private social networking applications offered by vendors, Elon University has chosen a DIY approach.

Over the course of 4 months, a team of four built what now looks like a pretty good “Facebook clone,” a social networking application including networks for students, faculty and staff members, alumni and parents: E², Elon’s Town Square.

I first heard about this interesting initiative about a month ago.

David Morton, Elon’s Web Manager, will be presenting a webinar on how to build your own social networking website for Higher Ed Experts during Social Networking Week, a 5-webinar event scheduled on October 1-5, 2007 and featuring 4 other experts on the different aspects of this vast topic (if you’re interested in this event, make sure to join HEE to receive updates about the program and registration information and to get the 50% discount reserved to members on all HEE webinars. Membership is open to people working in institutions and is free. Register at www.higheredexperts.com/register).

In the meantime, this interview I did with Dan Anderson, Assistant Vice President and Director of University Relations at Elon University, along with the screenshot of the Elon Phoenix’s profile (click on the thumbnail) I took should help you learn more about this original approach.

1) What are your goals for this new tool?

Our main goal is to enhance the Elon University community, with special emphasis on enhancing alumni and parent connections with Elon. We believe E2 (pronounced E-squared), the Elon’s Town Square, will allow people to build relationships, share their interests and expertise with other members of the community, enhance their career networking and have a great deal of fun.

Specifically, alumni can reconnect with their classmates and professors, share their latest family news and accomplishments through their personal profiles, and organize alumni chapters, gatherings and activities.

Students can learn about and interact with their professors, form campus groups, plan events and use E2 connections to work with alumni and parents to find internships or career opportunities.

Parents can meet and interact with other Elon parents, learn more about faculty and staff members, create and join groups, find others with mutual interests and be a networking and mentoring resource for Elon students.

2) Why did you decided to build it yourself?

We have had great success at Elon in building custom tools that fit our specific needs and goals. We can design features that help us meet our specific goals, and then adjust and add new features as we get feedback from our users. Our previous in-house products that have been highly successful include E-Net (campus information central), E-Web – our custom-built content management system, and the new Elon athletics site.

3) How much did it cost?

All aspects of E2 were handled by our University Relations staff members: Dan Anderson (Director of University Relations), David Morton (Web Site Manager), John David Parsons (Web Applications Programmer) and Christopher Eyl (Graphic Designer). The system resides on our existing Web servers, so there was no hardware cost. There were no additional costs. The development
took about four months.

4) What are the main features? Is it integrated with Facebook or other third-party social networking websites?

Main features include personal profiles, groups, messaging, events, a community photo gallery, extensive search functions, and a resume/work portfolio system that allows users to create professional vitae and work samples and share with people outside the system (a career-networking tool that will be valuable to students and alumni). There is also a flagging system to allow all members to report objectionable content posted on the site.

The site is not integrated with any other sites. It is a closed network, open only to Elon alumni, students, parents and faculty and staff members.

My third UB column for 2007 is now available in the June issue as well as online: “A Second Life for Higher Education?”

If you are a University Business reader who has just discovered collegewebeditor.com, welcome! Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog via RSS or email.

If you have any questions or feedback about the blog or the column, feel free to email me at karine@collegewebeditor.com .

I’ll post the interviews I did for this column in the next few days.

The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a great video report this morning on his blog as part of a post titled “An Anthropologist Explores Video Blogging.”

Produced by Jeffrey R. Young, the video report does an excellent job presenting Professor Wesch’s work at KSU as well as his famous YouTube video about Web 2.0.

Too bad this Chronicle’s video can’t be embedded or shared easily as I’m sure it would have made a great piece of viral marketing for the Chronicle.

Professor Wesch will give a presentation about his YouTube success (with over 2 million views, at the time of this posting) at the first inaugural webinar at Higher Ed Experts on June 14 at 1PM ET: How to go viral with your videos on YouTube: What makes a YouTube success?

The webinar is free to registered HEE members, and membership is free for people working in higher ed institutions.

You can become a member at www.higheredexperts.com/register.

Spring might be upon us, but some folks at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have really their mind more focused on ice, snow and Web 2.0.

To promote their research team’s expedition at Palmer Station Antarctica, they launched, earlier this month, a dedicated website called “UAB in Antarctica” that uses a lot of Web 2.0 components (a blog by the researchers themselves, technorati tags, delicious links, a flickr photo stream right from the ice and even a few YouTube videos shot before everybody left for the trip).

While browsing the site, I read the blog entry by UAB Ph.D. Philip Bucolo, M.S. posted a couple of days ago and titled “Joining the Team”. Besides the fact that this marine biologist is a good writer, what caught my attention was the comment section of his post. Bucolo has taken the time to respond to each comment from coworkers but also total strangers such as Mr. Don Miller, an 80-year old reader whose son introduced him to the website.

Starting a direct conversation with a researcher thousands of miles away from you, that’s definitely exciting whatever your age is. What a great way to put a human face on research and… on researchers ;-)

I’m sure UAB didn’t pick Bucolo because he would be a good fit for this Web 2.0 experiment, but he will bring a lot to this side of the project.

Why?

He helps us put a human face on otherwise “obscure” research. Two comments about his video interview on YouTube seem to confirm it.

Jeff Keeton, Web Communications Specialist at UAB, explained in an email that, “the main goal of this website is student recruitment, both at undergraduate and graduate levels. But our recruitment plans go all the way back to grade school children, because sadly, science and math are not taught at the levels they should be in our state and nationwide. We are trying to get more students, at all levels, to think about science and research as careers.”

The site was featured this past week on CNN.com, so UAB definitely got something right.

How could UAB make its website even more effective?

I think they should use a meaningful url format for their blog posts (always useful for people and search engines alike) and embed their YouTube videos on the website.