Recently in Confs/Workshops Category

This morning I attended a webinar: "Facebook and Twitter Recruitment Tools Engage Prospective Students," presented by Mike Richwalsky, Assistant Director of Public Affairs, Allegheny College. Althought he webinar was weighted on using these tools for marketing a college or university rather than instruction, I still got a good deal from it. Being in the LTC can be called upon by colleagues in UA departments and programs to help understand how to use social networking tools. As I've done a few other times now, I tweeted while listening to the speaker and following his slides.

Richwalsky began with a short overview of why higher edu should be using social media, sharing these four points: 1) Enhance your existing marketing, 2) Create or enhance your connection with your "customers," 3) Find new "customers" at a reduced cost, 4) Spread good news instantaneously. He gave examples a little later showing how Allegheny's Twitter site accepts replies and its Facebook site accepts comments. What is important is to treat these in a customer focused way and seize the opportunity to exchanging messages with the sender. He said if someone writes "your tuition costs too much" you can try to engage that student and could direct him to financial aid.

As in the last webinar I attended that was about a university YouTube channel, he pointed out that more people beyond the digital native age are using social networking. He provided a statistice from a Neilsen Group report showing the biggest increase in blog and social networking users came in the 35-49 age group. And he emphasized the importance of promoting your Facebook page on the college's homepage, adding links to print documents, adding "share this on Facebook" on every page on your website, and inviting students to participate in Allegheny College's Class of 2013 in their acceptance letter (after their deposit). He also showed how Allegheny had ushered students into Ning where they had "by invitation only." This seemed to be a good way to have your students away from the fraud merchants selling t-shirts.

This morning I attended a webinar: YouTube on Campus: Applications, Tools & Tips for Your College. Blurb: "Creating effective YouTube videos provides your University with many opportunities to communicate with your current & prospective students. What type of content should you post online & what types of videos best connect with your students? " It last about an hour and 15 minutes, including 30 minutes of Q & A after the presentation.
It was hosted by Higher Ed Hero and cost the LTC $199.

The presenter was Justin Ware, the assistant director for broadcast and new media at the University of Minnesota. Ware's bio on the UMN website explains that he is "working to expand the use of multimedia communications by creating video news releases, b-roll and a variety of other visual and audio material. He also works with university departments to enhance their media presence, conducts media training for University experts and helps connect local television and radio stations with University sources." Nice to see that UMN has that level of support and guidance for the campus.

Ware began by talking about a UMN video specifically produced for YouTube. In this video, UMN physics professor James Kakalios discussed how he was tapped to add a physics perspective to the upcoming Warner Brothers movie, Watchmen. What Ware says Kakalios did, was to bring research and education to entertainment. Here's the UMN video. To whet your appetite, 2:42 into this video Prof. Kakalios says "Dr. Manhattan, presumably, is able to do this through his control of the quantum mechanical wave functions."

As he began discussing how to use your YouTube videos to leverage the investment made in creating them, Ware made an interesting observation. He said college age students are only in the third tier of the most watched demographics of watching YouTube videos. He said that 45-54 year olds and the next older group are ahead of college aged students. I need to email him to ask where this data comes from. If it's from YouTube's InSight analytics of the UMN videos, then it could be skewed a bit.

He also said to engage students by using campus mascots in the videos and UMN's example is using Goldy Gopher in a video about getting flu shots. In addition he suggests contests and using popular media to attract your target audience.

He touched on admissions recruitment videos, something I am keenly interested in seeing the UA do much more on. Not long ago I read an interview with an enrollment consultant who was speaking about how universities need to be hooking into social software to reach prospective undergrads. This consultant said that the most important part of your campus website is the admissions site, not the campus' homepage. So create videos that highlight what your college is known for and what you want your college to be know for.

Remember that UMN's main YouTube channel is managed out of the campus News office. So Ware says that these should be polished videos but that there is room for less polished videos. He encourages the colleges, departments and other units to have YouTube channels. These he says are good places to house lectures and student work.

Friday afternoon, Gretchen, Wayne and I did the second of two professional development sessions for UA South faculty and staff. This one was held at the UA South Tech Park.

During the session we reviewed podcasting, iTunes, iTunes U, and the UA's iTunes U site. Then Gretchen led the participants in a hand-on learning experience with Audacity. Here's an image of GG and Wayne in action.

I attended EDUCAUSE's Southwest Regional Conference (SWRC) February 24 - 26, 2009 in San Antonio. I think I heard that there were 330 registered. I like this regional conferences over EDUCAUSE annual because it is far smaller and seems more focused on sharing ideas and experiences with IT projects that appeal to me. This regional used to be called EduTEX and developed for higher ed schools in Texas. Over the years it attempted to gain greater participation from throughout the southwest. In practice, participation is drawn from many states - this year's regional had representation from 25 states, although I'd say the greatest number come from Texas.

This year's conference theme was Balancing Acts: Making IT Work for Everyone, and examined "solutions and strategies for meeting the broad range of technology needs that define the higher education experience. The increasing importance of demonstrating IT's value and the ubiquitous nature of technology as a resource require IT professionals to juggle many different perspectives." I also presented about the UA's YouTube channel. What follows is a look at some of the presentations that I attended. Presenters are asked to submit their Powerpoints to the Educause website. I've linked to the few that are currently available in my entry. You should check there for others of interest over the coming week. And, if you have any questions I might help answer, feel free to ask.

The main conference opened with "Balancing Acts: Making IT Work for Everyone." Alan Levine, Vice President, NMC Community & CTO, The New Media Consortium (NMC), and Susan M. Zvacek, Director, Instructional Dev & Support, University of Kansas, role-played three scenarios designed to open discussion on the sorts of everyday challenges people in IT face. They developed scripts that they hoped would entertain us and open the way for sharing ideas. Act I "Us vs. the IT Guys" opened the how to balance the security and centralization needs that IT staff see as crucial with others on campus who want what the want and want it now. Act II "My ___ Doesn't Get it" involved an administrator who didn't appreciate or support breaking out of the traditional classroom and into a learning environment that recognized that it is students who are driving this change, not technology. Act III "It's All IT isn't It?" was a typical us versus them theme. The speakers placed their scripts online and hope to continue the discussion at bit.ly/whereisthebalance. If you visit this second site, you can complete a short survey and contribute your own stories. (Educause Connect podcast added 030409)

On Friday, I had the opportunity to join a dozen other UA staff in Cupertino for the UA's Apple Executive Briefing. Cupertino is the location of Apple's corporate headquarters and referred to as the Silicon Valley Campus. The first thing that I'll say is that our Apple hosts were all extremely friendly and professional.

Apple HQ has six main buildings and the main street is Infinite Loop, which (of course) has a Wikipedia entry.

The UA contingent consisted of: Steve McCarthy, VP External Relations; Paul Allvin, Assoc. VP for Communications; Kate Jensen, Asst. VP Marketing/External Relations; Scott Cason, Marketing Director, Enrollment Management ; Melissa Vito, VP Student Affairs; Magan Alfred, Program Coordinator, Education and Outreach, Dean of Students Office; Sarah Beaudry, Communications Director, Alumni Association; Scott Fiddelke, webmaster, External Relations; Johnny Cruz, Jeff Harrison, & Pila Martinez, UA News; George Humphrey, Asst. VP, AHSC Public Affairs.

So what did we learn during our briefing?

Last week I attended the EDUCAUSE SW Regional Conference in Austin, Texas. You can view the conference's program on the Web and follow the link to view a list of sessions with available resources. I also presented "Campus Casting Call: Engaging Students and Faculty with Podcasting" [PDF 1.2MB]

Here is an MP3 version of the podcast I created for my IRLS 571 Spring Semester class and RTF copy of the script to the audio. I am podcasting each week and for this week's podcast was about the conference. It's a way to share a real-world experience with students. The audio is 15 minutes long and includes short summaries of presentations I found interesting. If you listen, I'm sure you can easily do other things. FYI, the first couple minutes explain EDUCAUSE and briefly describe the conference's organization so students have a better understanding of the organization and how its conferences are structured.