A lot of discussion lately has revolved around how/why/if/should Twitter be used in Higher Ed. While my recent research of nearly 300 incoming freshman shows that……..2 students use Twitter, I want to go back to a point that I made in my last post about this topic.
Does the student even need to know what Twitter is, or that they are using it?
Here’s a freebie for you.
Twitter Text Updates. Twitter was essentially designed and built around SMS, but seems to veered from that. Let’s not forget about this powerful feature. Here’s my step-by-step guide to get started. I can’t lay it out for you any more than this.
It seems like nearly everyone has arrived home from eduWeb 2008 after travel issues plagued the trip back (I’m still waiting on my luggage…). So today you’re getting settled into your desk, fresh with ideas and energized to change the world. You’ve got notes, resources, new connections at universities and colleges across the map, and you’re ready to rock.
So where do you go from here? Most of the time, someone who attends a conference follows a graph like this:
You get really excited at the conference. Your enthusiasm for your job is renewed. You have faith that things can be changed. But as soon as you get back to your office, confidence starts going down. Things start to return to business as normal, and before you know it you’re right back where you were before the conference.
Let’s do better than that.
Here is a quick 10-step plan to help you get the most out of your conference experience from eduWeb 2008 if you’re just getting your feet wet in a lot of the topics you heard about this week.
10 Steps to Maximize Your Conference Experience
Schedule a meeting with your supervisor/boss/direct reports/team. Right now. Come prepared with a short and sweet summary (no more than 1 page) of key takeaways and implementations that you want to move towards. Have a discussion about each, and what steps you can take to get it done. Proceed.
Reflect on resources other than yours. Use Matt’s post of eduWeb2008 content that we have all created to refresh your mind or to catch up on sessions you might have missed.
Watch presentations again, or share them with your co-workers. Point out specific segments they should watch. Here are the streams:
Join Twitter! Stay connected with others that you have met and continue to have conversations revolving around what you’re doing at work and the trending topics in higher ed. After joining Twitter, head over to Kyle James’ blog and start adding other higher education tweeters from the extensive list.
Start using RSS. A few months back I did a quick how-to on getting started with RSS. Watch it and begin subscribing to blogs so that you can keep up with the information better.
Start a blog. Head over to Wordpress and start to type out some thoughts about what you’re working on. Be sure to email me your link at bradjward(at)gmail(dot)com so that I can add you to my RSS feeds.
Try something new. I personally am going to play with cloud computing to see how it works first-hand. Think of one thing from the conference you’ve never heard about or used, and try it out.
Join the Conversation. It’s not just the title of my eduWeb 2008 presentation, it’s something you can do to become more connected with others. Start commenting on blogs or posting in the uwebd forums. BlogHighEd.org is also a great place to start, but there are many more great blogs out there. Check blogrolls of others to find many more quality blogs in higher ed.
I hope that you can take a few of these steps to get started towards better work and amazing projects. You can do it; be persistent and make change happen in your organization.
eduWeb 2008 was great. The conversations and connections that took place were so much richer and in-depth than any conference I’ve been to before. Kudos to the vendors for providing multiple networking receptions for us to gather at. The BlogHighEd.org Meetup was also highly attended, with approximately 75 people joining us through the hour. I was glad to be a part of the event, and look forward to keeping in touch with all of you.
Hey Everyone! We’re going to try something new here at SquaredPeg called How-To Tuesday. Each week we’re going to try and pick a topic and do a quick demo or show some neat benefits of using it. This week I’m talking about subscribing to RSS feeds.
The video is below. The quality turned out a little worse than I wanted, so I’ll work on the export settings next week. This was running a little long so I didn’t get to touch on Share/Star/Trends, so that will be a quick addendum next week. Hopefully you can get something out of it if you aren’t using RSS already.
As always, let me know what you think or if there is anything out there you want to learn more about, and we’ll continue to learn together. Enjoy!
