Paul Baker works as a Senior University Relations Specialist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. This higher PR professional has been blogging for about a year at Here at WCER before moving to EducationPR.
1) Why did you decide to blog at that time and why did you switch blogs? Can you tell us a bit more about your experience with blogging?
Blogging evolves as you spend more time with it. At first, I thought of blogging as another one-way communication channel for increasing awareness of the research done here at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. WCER is home to about 50 federally funded projects. Barely a year later, I find myself with new acquaintances and friends who are helping me to be a better communicator.
I have a story to tell. Several months ago I set up Here at WCER on Blogger to post recent findings in education research and to point readers to our corporate site www.wcer.wisc.edu. Didn’t ask anyone’s permission; just started it. Fortunately, it has worked out well.
But I did hit an initial glitch. My new blog raised questions within the organization that led to changes in its focus.
So the director met with me and the web team to discuss how my blogging might best complement our corporate website. Number one, I was asked to come up with new content, rather than posting material I had already developed for other communication channels. OK, fair enough. So I changed my blog’s focus from education research to education communications, especially developments in new media that K-12 education communicators might find useful.
Given that change in focus, and given some months of experience with the Blogger platform, I looked into TypePad and WordPress. I liked WordPress’s functionality, especially its ability to create static pages, and the fact that it didn’t have a reputation as a haven for spam blogs. I chose to use the free version. My old site stays up as an archive and gets several visits per week. So I’m happy, the web team guys are happy, the director is happy.
In the process I’ve learned about related communication technologies including podcasting, social bookmarking, and search tools. It’s fun to watch these technologies grow and become more sophisticated and powerful. With all the good resources out there, and all the helpful people, you can teach yourself a lot. It’s been an enjoyable year.
2) You are working in PR at your institution. Have you managed to use new media (blogs, podcasts, RSS, etc.) in your work?
Blogging and podcasting are new communication channels I use in a mix of dissemination activities including a quarterly printed newsletter, a monthly electronic newsletter, and our web site. My goal is to have them all work together as a family.
Lots of people in lots of places would like to blog at work, but they’re not allowed. It’s a privilege that I appreciate.
Over the past months blogging has helped me connect with communicators at other institutions; kept me in the loop about new communication technologies; raised the profile of my employer and, most recently, created opportunities for me to travel and speak to educators about new media. Just last month I told a group of teacher certification people in Minneapolis that blogging and podcasting had changed my life: I wouldn’t have been presenting a workshop at their conference otherwise. I’ll present workshops to education organizations in Dallas and Anaheim in the next months.
Podcasting is a natural extension of radio. (I host a world music show on the UW-Madison student radio station WSUM and post my playlists). I already felt comfortable using microphones so I learned how to record and edit with Audacity’s software, how to create an RSS feed (Thanks, Dan!), and how to notify podcast directories about Wisconsin Center for Education Research News (available via iTunes and other fine podcast directories). At first I was posting several episodes a week, now it’s more like once a month. I focus on education research and summarize new material that has been posted to our corporate web site.
RSS has proven useful: I subscribe to nearly 190 feeds, mostly relating to PR, technology, and communication. I don’t read every feed every day, but I do try to interpret this mix of information and add value for communicators in K-12 education. I try to put myself in the shoes of the appointed PR person for a school district or a school board, or a communicator in a state department of education. I have a small but regular audience: EducationPR gets about 50 site visits a day, and about 70 people pick up the RSS feed.
3) In your opinion, how should higher ed PR or MarCom offices use these new technologies? Can you share any best practices you’ve observed in other universities/colleges?
If I can inspire people to explore blogging and related technologies, and to adapt them for their own environment, I’ll be happy.
To be honest, most of my inspiration has come not from the education sector, but from the private sector — PR professionals in business. As an example I would mention the podcast For Immediate Release with Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson. Another good resource is the blog and wiki by Constantin Basturea, PR Meets the WWW . There’s lots to be learned from the for-profit sector.
Having said that, I do think UW-Madison is on the ball. When I served on its home page redesign committee a couple years ago, RSS came up in the discussion. Several departments here offer RSS feeds, including the university library, university news service, department of instructional technology, Internet Scout project, computer assisted engineering, and the Institute for Environmental studies, to name a few. People are blogging from the department of high energy physics, the law library, and instructional technology. Even the university’s CIO blogs! Podcasts are produced here on campus by the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, various language departments including Spanish and German, and Earthwatch Radio, for starters.
I just look at kids in Gen X and Gen Y and their innate ability to gather and share information online. I try to keep up. Heck, I even launched a MySpace site and started posting photos to Flickr. I encourage education communicators to keep up with blogging and MySpace and podcasting and iTunes and Technorati and Flickr, lest we become invisible to the students on whose behalf we all (theoretically) work. We wouldn’t try to communicate with them by scratching on cuneiform tablets or by beating on a log drum. So why do we keep mailing them so much paper? And now they apparently don’t think email is cool.
Granted, students of tomorrow and today are not our only audience. But they are shaping the larger world of communication. Look at how mainstream media is evolving. It’s being pushed. Kids have real power.
(Steps down off his soapbox.) I just hope nobody in education communications dismisses blogging and podcasting as faddish or unimportant. I sense a conservative trend in the education world. Maybe it’s satisfaction with the state of communication as it is, or (shudder) as it was a decade ago. Maybe it’s fear of “what could go wrong†if very controlled top-down communication (from school district to the community, for example) evolves into more open (and therefore riskier) bottom-up communication that occurrs in a public sphere. Think what a service we could provide, given the limited resources the usual daily newspaper devotes to covering education.