Recently in Social Software Category

Thanks to Deb Andrysiak for sending these three excellent sites about Twitter for academics.

100 Serious Twitter Tips for Academics by Jill Gordon appears in the blog Best Colleges Online. The post correctly points out that Twitter "has grown into a powerful tool for business, communication, and education" and offers 100 tips on getting started, Twitter etiquette, strategies, ideas for instructors, benefits for students, tips for the class, assignments using Twitter, suggestions for people and things to track on Twitter, Twitter tools, Twitter tools for use in academia, andinding people in academia to follow.

Twitter.edu: Resources for using a micro-blog application in an academic setting is Elaine Edwards of Kansas State's blog devoted to using Twitter in higher ed. It's current and includes posts titled "ech Tips for Educators," "Suggested K-State Twitter Guidelines," and "Examples of Twitter Usage from other Universities."

Twitter Fan Wiki is an actual Twitter site that was "set this up as a place to post cool ideas, uses and feature requests for Twitter. Share anything you've found that you think the Twitter community might be interested in!" This site also has a directory of higher ed Twitter sites.

Been working on material for next week's Twitter workshop and found that since I last worked on my Twitter guide (back in July) the number of UA sites tweeting has grown significantly. Here is my current list.

UA - Institutional
U of Arizona
Admissions
Alumni Office
Arizona Cancer Center
Arizona Public Media
Athletics Department
BIO5 Institute
Center for English as a Second Language
College of Education
College of Pharmacy
Department of Geology
Early Outreach
High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
Institutional Repository
Office of Technology Transfer
Parking & Transportation Services
Police Department
UA Press
SALT (Students with Learning and Attention Challenges)
School of Journalism
School of Media Art
Steele Center

UA-Organizational
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Arizona Volleyball
GallagherTheater
Gymnastics
Solar Decathlon
Wilbur T. Wildcat

Professional
Htay Hla, IT director at the College of Public Health
Matt Stoner, Instructional Designer Integrative Medicine
Melody Buckner
Michael Griffith, director, application development group
Stuart Glogoff

2013 Tees is run by college students uniting incoming college freshman classes with class tee shirts. We create unique, relevant tees for college freshman every year. Our tees are worn at around college campuses nation wide at freshman orientation, collegiate sporting events, and everyday college life. We hope you like our tees! Have a great freshman year Class of 2013!

I picked up a rice bowl at the Panda Express in the student union today. On my way out I pass Alan Beaudrie who tells me a story. Alan is in the College of Public Health and works with student services slash academic affairs. He was an early adopter of blogging to reach students and had successful sites for MEZCOPH and the College of Nursing.

Alan tells me that he found a Facebook site directed to the UA's class of 2013. There's also one for the U. of Georgia. And the purpose is simply to suck in in-coming freshmen and get them to buy a t-shirt. Here's a page showing happy students prouding wearing their UGA Go Dawgs! tees. They run about $15 and you pay through PayPal. The tees do not have the university logo on them so I don't think there is any logo infringement. It seems more like we're dealing with entrepreneurs, perhaps college-age, who know how to exploit social software to their advantage. Whether they actually ship a t-shirt we don't know, at least at this time. Could Pay Pal transfer the funds to an account that can be cleaned out without the owners leaving a trace? Maybe because I once fell for the magazine subscription scam my radar is constantly up.

If you have a Facebook account, login and search on class of 2001 + arizona. The first site shows 1,904 members and looks like it could be a legit UA site. But it's not. In recent news it features the point of the site, "Hey don't forget to check out the zona class of 2013 t-shirt here... high quality, tagless, with free shipping. http://www.2013Tees.com/azona" (spelling doesn't count)

Alan also pointed me to a Chronicle of Higher Education article from December 2008, "Company Created Official-Looking 'Class of 2013' Facebook Groups for Hundreds of Colleges." LOTS of comments and well worth reading.

Okay, not everywhere, but you're seeing more and more websites taking advantage of it. For instance, ...

I just finished reading Steve Lopez's The Soloist and took a look at the trailer on The Soloist movie website. If you are not familiar with the story, Steve Lopez is a journalist for the L.A. Times and he came upon Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless man who had studied at Julliard. The book combines a moving story of these two men and the place music played in their relationship, with a vivid depiction of life in L.A.'s Skid Row and mental illness. On the website you get the trailer, information about the movie, a selection of Flash movies about making the movie, clicks, interviews - I'm sure you'll find them on the DVD in 6 months. There are videos of Lopez and Ayers recalling how they first met and a few anecdotes. Seeing the real Nathaniel Ayers is special. Okay, back to point.

The website navigation includes sections for "GET INVOLVED" and "WHAT DOES MUSIC MEAN TO YOU?" GET INVOLVED includes: 1) TakePart, where one can "TakePart in the issues of Homelessness and Mental Illness." 2) an invitation to "submit a photo of that you think best represents L. A. to you." The L. A. Times is going to have a Soloist section at some point and will include selected photos. 3) a link to read Steve Lopez's columns on Ayers, 4) a place to express how you are affected by music that is wrapped into a contest. Another tab, "WHAT DOES MUSIC MEAN TO YOU?" opens an new window with Jamie Foxx's image as Nathaniel Ayers playing the cello and a box where you can write your personal feelings about what music means to you.

Here's another good example. Stanford has a Facebook page. But instead of populating it with brochure-style information, they engage visitors to comment, look for something new with each visit and even give stuff away. Stanford has teamed up with iTunes to give away 30 free songs for becoming a Fan of Stanford University on Facebook!" [you need to log in to Facebook to get to this page.

So you've read the prev entry about Twitter but you're still not sure what to make of it? See it through the eyes of a 20sumthin. Watch this.

Estimates of the number of daily users vary as the company does not release the number of active accounts. In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million users.[2] A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third largest social network (MySpace would be second and Facebook would be the largest in the world[3]), and puts the number of users at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visitors at 55 million.Wikipedia article

I mentioned a few weeks ago that Colleen Lin had explained Twitter to me in a way that I could understand. Months and months ago I got an account and since then hadn't been seeing past the individual dig-me side of it. I'd heard reports of how the server crashed when millions of people went to it for updates on people and events during a natural disaster. I think it was the tsunami or fires in CA. In any case, the way to understand its value is as a resource to short bursts of information. You get 140 characters for your message. As I type this, I've been following Colleen's tweets. She's at what appears to be a conference re: social networking software. She's tweeting - short bursts of text - about what the panelists and presenters are saying. She had sent me a list of people using Twitter so that I might follow some to see who I connect with. And she recommended Tweetie, a $2.99 app I got from the iTunes App Store for my iPhone.

Who else is Tweeting? Edustyle has a list of academic social networking sites. Down the page are colleges and universities who use Twitter to push into out to anyone interested enough in following them. Okay you UA folks. True or false, the UA has a Twitter site? To quote Lily Von Schtupp, "it's twue.... it's twue!" I am sure that the tweets are coming out of UA News. If you visit the UA's Twitter site, you'll see links to UA News articles. BTW, I see that the UA's Twitter has 639 followers. Followers are people who are subscribing to the site's RSS feeds.

So, if you're still reading this entry you have a good idea of some of the reasons that Twitter is popular. Sure you can use it to connect to family, friends, colleagues, organizations and groups with similar interests. Read that Wikipedia article to ingest more examples. I have a lot more to learn about Twitter, tweeting, ...

I've started getting back into Ning, social networking software that I think has enormous uses for education. I used to teach - preach might be a better way of putting it - about convergence in Intro to IT. The idea that five years ago we separate devices for cell phones, digital camera, dig audio players, Web, and video but now we can get them all on one device. Well, Ning brings convergence to social networking. In one place you can host videos, photos, discussions forums, and events.

I've been creating one for Wayne's GRAD697b class, Teaching with Technology. The class gets to social software in about 5 weeks so for now I've set up the site, started a couple discussion threads and uploaded a couple videos. Interestingly, James Morrison, editor-in-chief of the online journal Innovate, sent an email inviting past authors to check out the recently created Innovate-Ideagora Ning site. In a nutshell, the idea is to "enhance professional communication about using IT tools in education."

This term, ideagora, was new to me so I Goolged it and found "Ideagora, a Marketplace for Minds" by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams in a February 15, 2007, BusinessWeek special report. (uh oh, I'm behind the times) Tapscott and Williams talk about InnoCentive in the Ideagoras chapter of their book Wikinomics. (That's better. At least know of the book.)

Just going to Ning's homepage now I can see how it is the 2008 extension of usenet newsgroups. The homepage tends to feature different Ning social networks and you can easily see how these virtual birds-of-a-feather are drawn different topics. Say, here's one for me! Social Cigar "The ultimate social network for cigar aficionados and cigar enthusiasts. Featuring cigar reviews, cigar ratings, forum, photos, video, live chat, groups, and a lot of other cigar related content." There will be 2133 members in just a minute.

If you click the subscribe button to set up a podcast in iTunes U, you do not get the title of the podcast but rather what one other iTunes U administrator called "Ugly URLs." I noticed this on Wed and checked the iTunes U Site Admins discussion forum to see if anyone else had reported it. There was an entry on Tuesday the 19th that included

For example, one of our podcast series should be showing up as T4: Tuesday Tips on Teaching with Technology. Instead, when you subscribe, what you get is http://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Feed/nau.edu.1622217296.0162...

When there was nothing added to it by Thursday I appended my on "me too!" Today, someone at Apple wrote:

Thanks for reporting this. This does indeed appear to be an issue. If you go into "Edit Track Preferences" and set the default location for track downloads to "Individual playlist per course" you will be able to work around the issue. We've noted the issue and will get to work on a fix.

A colleague sent a link to an entry in Kyle James' blog about Rachel Rueben's report "The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communications: A Guide for Professionals in Higher Education." [get the PDF] This is an interesting report and I recommend it to anyone how to market a program, college or university, recruit students, and reach alumni. Here is my summary.

In July 2008, Rueben posted a survey to several listservs and received 175 responses. After removing duplicates she wound up with 148 unique schools from which to draw data. The breakdown was overwhelmingly US (94.3%). Of those 148 institutions, 54% reported having an official Facebook page, 22% an official MySpace page. This tends to confirm what I've heard of late, that higher ed prefers Facebook to MySpace. 

More stats: just over half these 148 colleges and universities have an official presence on YouTube and 60% have some form of blogs on their site. 17% reported using del.icio.us. (p. 6)

Being involved in the UA's YouTube channel, echo her observation that a big reason to have an official YouTube channel is the cost savings it represents. "Universities have been making videos for 20+ years to aid in recruitment." YouTube is a platform to distribute them for free and save on the costs associated with burning CD/DVDs, packing and mailing them. (p.4) 

In terms of how the 148 are using YouTube, she wrote that use by these 148 colleges and universities "seems to be used primarily for recruitment purposes (30%) with some using it to share videos with current students and alumni. Most report spending 1-4 hours a week adding videos to their channel." (p. 7)

Her survey looks have solicited open ended "concerns" and the main concerns reported were: 1) loss of control, 2) time commitment, 3) information overload, and 4) anyone can create an "official" account for your university.

She concludes with her own "recommendations & considerations" (p. 11) emphasizing how social media offers ways to reach alumni and to recruit students. I'd be glad to talk with anyone interested in exploring the possibilities. One idea off the top of head is to have a UA site in Flickr and engage students to submit pictures of student life, the campus and the area. Students come up with great ideas on their own and maybe we need to be looking for more opportunities to tap into that creative resevoir.

My class recently covered a module on social software, focusing a bit on the Web 2.0 resources that are available to promote communication, collaboration, and hopefully build social capital.

Today in my professor's blog, I posted a couple entries looking at the social software uses related to the tragedy in Blacksburg. In my first entry I wrote "Wikipedia Articles on Tragedy at VA Tech" reporting how an entry on the Virginia Tech Massacres is already in Wikipedia and how a "spur" article was started on VA Tech President Charles Steger.

The second entry looks at how important the Web, blogs, and Facebook have been to VA Tech students, parents, friends and family members. See "More About VA Tech and Social Nature of Tools."

If you are looking for examples of how these tools can have a valuable place in building social capital, I think these are worthy examples.