3 questions to a higher ed blogger: Mike Richwalsky, Assistant Director of Public Affairs at Allegheny College, from “HighEdWebTech.com”

Mike Richwalsky and I date back from July 2005, even if we only met last year at the HighEdWeb conference in Rochester. Since my first interview with him published on this blog, Mike has been a source for a few of my UB columns and has presented 3 webinars for Higher Ed Experts. He will present the 4th one on September 24, “Beyond YouTube: How to host and promote your online videos on the Web.”
Mike has been blogging for some time now, but launched HighEdWebTech.com about 6 months ago, which is why I decided to ask him a few more questions.

1) You’ve been blogging for several years now at arsenic.net and ErieBlogs.com. Why did you decide to start your new blog HighEdWebTech.com earlier this year? Are you a blog addict?

Addict? Maybe. Glutton for punishment? Definitely.

I hatched the idea for HighEdWebTech.com after first discovering BlogHighEd.org. I’ve learned so much from the blogs that are a part of that network, but no one was really blogging about the technical side of higher education web development. At my institution, and I’d wager many other institutions, web people are often forced to wear many hats, including a technical one. My hatrack is loaded up: systems administrator, PHP programmer, graphic designer, video producer and podcast host to name but a few.

I see this blog as my opportunity to share the knowledge and expertise I’ve gained during my 10-year career in web development, 8 of which have been in higher education. I feel that I can be the Obi-Wan Kenobi for all the Luke Skywalkers out there. I also learn as much as I teach – I pose questions, and get great feedback and ideas from others. That willingness to share is really refreshing, especially amongst the higher-ed web bloggers as well as on Twitter.

2) How is your blogging received by your institution and your professional peers?

I hope my colleagues at other institutions find it informative. It’s grown well over the last six months, and people have been commenting and emailing me with questions and answers consistently. I really try to stay on topic as best as I can – it goes back to the hats. I do so many different things everyday that sometimes I blog about cloud services like Amazon S3 and the next post will talk about the latest HD camera and codec. I hope people dig the variety as much as I enjoy writing it.

I haven’t really promoted it on campus, but I know people read it because they sometimes mention a product or site I blogged about. Much like I read admissions marketing blogs even though I don’t work in that area, I think it’s good for admissions folks to read what I talk about. Not that I expect them to go out and start writing code or mashing up APIs, but it gives them a little insight into the challenges that institutions face when it comes to the web and where we’re all headed.

3) Your institution, Allegheny College, has always been an earlier adopter of all the new technologies (podcasting, videos, facebook applications, cloud computing, etc.) that have popped up at least since 2005. How do you explain it? How do you manage to have your boss(es) let you experiment with all these new tools so quickly?

I’m extremely fortunate that the administration at Allegheny trusts me and my knowledge. They’ve placed a lot of faith in me and I try not to let them down.

There’s value to being one of the first schools to jump into a technology or platform. There’s the publicity that you can get from being, in our case, one of the educational podcasts that was featured with iTunes and added their podcast directory or having Dave Winer talk about our use of RSS.

Sometimes, the technology in question solves a need, such as the cloud does for us in terms of bandwidth and backups.

To me, it’s important to have a presence in many of these areas because that’s where our customers are, be they prospective students or alumni. Case in point: Twitter. I created the college’s Twitter account over a year ago because as these new services come online, people will be using them–people who may want to learn or connect with Allegheny. Twitter wasn’t hardly mainstream at the time but people found our presence there and made the decision to stay in touch with Allegheny. The same goes for Facebook or Myspace or YouTube or Flickr. I like to get information about Allegheny out there in as many formats and ways as we can.