August 2006 Archives

There is a short article in the August 11th issue of Science by a stable of authors, including Tim Berners-Lee who is the lead author. The article, "Creating a Science of the Web," is available on Science's website.

A couple of the points that I took away from reading it are: 1) although the Web is an engineered space humans create the pages and make the links. Since humans are involved, the content that appears is affected by "social conventions and laws." 2) because researchers are dependent on the Web it is important to develop a methodology to identify emerging trends and to develop better mathematical modeling for the Web; 3) there is a significant challenge to accessing data resources--"most of the world's data are locked in large data stores and are not published as an open Web of inter-referring resources." Therefore we face social and public policy challenges to accessing and sharing data.

There is also an interesting graph that presents the Web yesterday and today. Check it out.

Noel-Levitz is a consulting firm that works with higher ed institutions -- 2-year public, 4-year public and private -- in areas such as student recruitment, student retention, financial aid management, market research and e-communications. I read over its recent E-Recruiting Practices Report: Summary of findings at two-year and four-year insitutions and think others will be interested in reading it as well. The report shows that taking information online (online forms) and using email is pretty common. However, it also reports that "most campuses had not yet implemented emerging toold such as blogging space, chat rooms, RSS/XML syndication or podcasting."

Here is a copy/paste from the Noel-Levitz webpage summarizing its findings to help you see if you want to look further at the report.

• Less than one-third of campuses have adopted cutting-edge tools for e-recruitment such as blogging space and chat rooms.
• Purchasing students' e-mail addresses is common at four-year institutions (nearly 80% follow this practice) but not at two-year institutions (11%).
• Collecting e-mail addresses from parents is less common, with just 30 percent of institutions following this practice.
• Just over 40 percent of institutions collect applicants' cell/mobile numbers.
• At four-year institutions, more than half of prospective students use electronic applications.
• A significant number of prospective students who use electronic applications had made no previous contact with the institution.
• The vast majority of institutions (90%) are spending less than $50K/year to maintain admissions-specific content and services on their institution's Web site.