Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

The Innovative Educators Conference, which wraps up tomorrow with a presentation by Brian Niles of TargetX fame, has been a great one. Val, Erin and Pam from IE did a great job putting the conference together and keeping everything rolling. The food was the best conference food I’ve had. A night out to the Reds/Dodgers game with all you can eat food and drinks was a nice touch too.

Here are the links I went through for those of you that were in my 2 presentations on Wednesday. Again, if you have any questions, please email me at bradjward(at)gmail(dot)com.

I Can Do THAT With Google?: http://linkbun.ch/gnq

Blogging 201: Taking It To The Next Level: http://linkbun.ch/gnk and http://linkbun.ch/gno

Also, here is the image used during the Social Media Roundtable with Brad and Matt:

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It’s always great to connect with new people. I also got to catch up with Mark, Matt, and Brian and we had several really great conversations about a huge range of topics. I’ve always been big on the value of face time, and this event has not disappointed. I was also able to line up a webinar on this coming Tuesday night with an MBA class at Morehead State University, so it’s time to start on that slide deck.

One month until eduWeb! Who all is going to be there? I’d love to meet more of you.

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Let’s talk a little bit about expectations of an admission website, and the evolving nature of it. I’m going to speak in terms of the Whole Product Concept, which some of you might be familiar with. It looks like this:

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about uses for Twitter in Higher Ed. I’ve said before (here):

[...] having the kids sign up for Twitter is just another barrier to communication. While I am typically an advocate for universities using services rather than reinventing the wheel, Twitter has yet to prove its stability to me.

There has also been a lot of talk about Twitter, how to use it in Higher Ed, what might be effective, what might not be, etc. I’ve sort of sat back and soaked this all in, watching developments at other universities and trying to think of how I can use Twitter to enhance a student’s experience on our site.

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Today’s video is a quick overview of trackbacks and how to use them.

I mentioned a link in the video, and that discussion is right here. (You should see a ‘trackback’ comment from this post when you go there!)

I also said that you can’t trackback in Blogger, but technically you can if you wish to install some extra goodies. Learn more here. Also, you can learn more about how trackback works, or read another example from Wordpress. Have a great day!

I always love looking at this page and seeing what my bloggers are talking about.  A big part of the Blogger training was teaching them about tags. Here is the document I gave them(PDF).  Sorry about the quality, I can’t find the original so I had to scan it.  Just pretend that it’s colorful and cool.)

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I see BU101 is very large, which relates to the BU101 Photos area. That is the 9th most visited page on the entire Admission site, with 5700 views in the last 4 months.   Also big are sports (basketball, sports,volleyball, hinkle) and student life (BUSF, homecoming, pi beta phi, SGA events, midnight snack). Another area is off-campus (IMA, broad ripple, chicago, indianapolis).  As a side note, Voodoo is the name of one of the largest frat parties on campus, at Halloween.  To my knowledge, none of my bloggers are practicing voodoo on their professors.

What sticks out to you?

Just in: I’ll be giving two presentations on day 1 of the upcoming conference:
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I just got an email from Dan at Rapleaf.com with an interesting pitch.

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Our mascot now has a blog, and it’s pretty good stuff. I have to say though, we missed a huge opportunity from an Admission standpoint.

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When I was a junior at my university in 2004-2005, the student blogger program was launched.  (I later became a student blogger myself, and went on to oversee the initiative after that.)They were very early in the student blogging game, and took a big risk.  Sure, we’ve refined our efforts in the past 3 years and really drilled down the type of student that makes a suitable blogger, but every administrator always has the same question…………. what if? What if the student says xyz, etc.

Well, tonight while tidying up a computer, I ran across a document from my undergraduate years titled ‘The Real Deal’.  I instantly knew it was from the bloggers. And I instantly knew what it was.  It was that 1 in a million post, the What If? post, if you will.   I caution you to proceed carefully, because you never know what might come out of a senior’s mouth the night before graduation.  And why do I have this saved?  Because I knew it wouldn’t last long. (The actual save date is 5/7/2005 at 2:13am.) And sure enough, the next morning it was gone.  Did the student delete it, or did the administration? That’s the missing piece of the puzzle.  Without further ado, I present to you, completely unedited and in its entirety… the What If Post. And seriously, don’t say I didn’t tell you so.
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Last year, about 2 weeks on the job, I pitched a lofty proposal to have Lifecasters in addition to bloggers. These lifecasters would have a setup similar to Justin.TV, and would essentially stream live video of their college experience for future students to see what it’s really like (outside of marketing, microsites, and rehearsed pitches).

Last year the response was basically “no way”, or “you really think it’s a good idea to let students with cameras walk around campus and show what it’s like?!?” My general answer… Yes. They decided that we should get the bloggers going and see how that would go first. (Side note: everyone was worried about letting bloggers say what they want, letting people comment without moderation, etc. etc. etc. Guess how much content we have had to moderate or delete? ZERO.)

At what point will we stop trying to show students what we think they will like to hear, and just start showing them what it’s really like to go somewhere? Even our overnight visit programs are strategically designed and planned, and I agree there needs to be some sort of organization, but is there truly a way to give a student a “real” experience without putting them in danger?

I’d love to hear what you all think about this. I’ll admit I have generally been hush-hush about my Lifecaster initiative because I would have liked for my University to be on the forefront of this technology, but now it seems that it might be beneficial for others to be doing it before I can try to get some buy-in. At least I can say I tried, and I had all the resources ready. Even Justin.TV was going to stream our video for FREE. (Click this link and listen to our conversation from about 7 months ago, scroll to 1:05. Most of the clip got cut from its original version for some reason.)

And if anyone knows of a school that’s doing this, leave a comment so I can check it out. And as always, I’d love to hear what you think.