Here’s some more info about next week’s New Communications Forum where I’ll be doing some live blogging.

–Posts are being tagged NewComm and NewComm Forum. I’m going to simplify it and go with NewComm.

–Phil Gomes will have his podcast-recording deck and is looking for good ideas for the Edelman earShot podcast.

–In addition to the live blogging, I’ll be doing short video interviews for New Communications Review. I’m most interested in capturing reactions to ideas presented and discussed during the keynotes and sessions. I’ll be asking questions like, How have your impressions of new media been impacted by the NewComm dialogue?

Technorati tag: NewComm

Just realized that yesterday’s PAETC was being live-blogged on ETC @ BMC.

Next week I’ll be live-blogging and contributing interviews from New Communications Forum in Palo Alto. These contributions will be part of the the New Communications Review.

Jen McClure and company have assembled a stunning keynote lineup and an equally formidable session program for thie event. It’s hard to conveive that so many of the individuals responsible for advancing the new media are going to be assembled in one place. For me, it will be great to meet in-person many of those with whom I’ve been working on SNCR over the last few months.

If you’re going to be blogging from the event, or blogging about the event, please let me know. I’m planning to assemble a blogroll and some OPML. If you’re planning to attend (and I strongly encourage it!), please give me a shout so we can meet up.

This afternoon I’ll be giving a talk at the PAET conference near Philadelphia on the topic of optimizing classroom blogs for search engine exposure.

Here is a link to the first page of my presentation. I’ve created the pages in WordPress so that the links will be available to everyone immediately. Sorry, no PowerPoint! I will also be screencasting the presentation and posting it shortly.

Technorati tags: SEO, class blogs

Colgate University has launched a new podcast.

Colgate Conversations are podcasts that feature faculty members, alumni, administrators, and students talking about cutting-edge research projects, higher education issues, careers after college, and life on campus.

Goucher College is publishing RSS feeds for general, admissions, alumni, and development news.

Boise State University will host BYOM (Be Your Own Media), a conference that will focus on “the evolution of new media such as RSS, Web 2.0, blogs and podcasts, and how they can be used to create communications platforms through which companies can reach customers and market influencers.”

Virginia Tech plans to launch a podcast in connection with their “Invent the Future” campaign. (No link to the podcast is provided.)

Ohio Wesleyan University launches admission blogs featuring five student bloggers.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor Calvin Garvin is offering audio podcasts of his psychology lectures, and is moving toward video. (No link to the podast is provided.)

Vanderbilt University has several audio and video podcasts.

East Carolina University College of Education plans to use iPods in connection with several courses.

Asheville Citizen-Times: Seattle student Stephen Neff funds tuition at University of Michigan Ann-Arbor through blogging.

Over the past few weeks and months I’ve received several requests for interviews on podcasting in higher education, and not only from those in the higher education community.

I want to thank two bloggers who were kind enough to publish those interviews in their entirety: Karine Joly at Collegewebeditor.com (link to interview) and Donna Papacosta at Trafcom News Podcast (link to interview show notes).

As I hinted in an earlier post, Karine is doing a generous service to the community by posting full-length interviews she held in advance of her recent column in University Business. In many ways, I’m finding the interviews to be more valuable than the column, though clearly the two are intended for different audiences.

Donna sees ways that business communicators can learn from those experimenting with podcasting in higher ed, which I find intriguing, considering higher education’s sometime-reputation for being slow to integrate new technologies.

Through these interviews, I’m increasingly aware of how podcasting, blogging, and other consumer-generated, social-oriented media are creating oppotunities for connections and learning among disparate industries and previously disconnected disciplines within industries. The change is both positive and unsettling. Clearly, I am not the first to make this observation.

For example, look at how corporate communicators are reaching out to connect with higher education. Consider how, through events like HigherEd BlogCon, instructors, librarians, and marketers are rallying together around common points of interest.

Without a doubt, we are living in times of great change as many barriers erode (and new ones form). The relationship between change and connectedness is a tricky one, and the discussion seems to be popping up more frequently. Do you feel more connected, or less connected? Speaking as a student, Sean Blanda is one who clearly feels the disconnect and is doing something about it in a reverently irreverent fashion, through his blog. (Sean’s blog should be a must-read for instructors and all in academia seeking to gain a good understanding of a student perspective on learning and tools of the new Web.)

All of this means change for the University. What will your new place of learning be like?

I’m excited and honored to be part of the Philadelphia Area Educational Technology Conference taking place next week at Haverford College. The conference focuses on “Teaching the Millenials.” As part of a panel entitled “Reaching Broader Audiences,” I’ll be talking about a variety of ways to optimize classroom blogs for search engine visibility.

Some may ask, Why connect your classroom to the world of search? Despite media coverage to the contrary, I will argue (albeit briefly) that blogging can be good for your university, good for your students, and good for your career, so why not take a few steps to maximize your blogging efforts?

Rest assured, this will not be another ho-hum presentation on SEO (search engine optimization). Yes, we will mention the bare-minimum SEO basics, but we will quickly move on to talk about the relevance of tagging communities, Technorati, Google Base, Google Sitemaps, and RSS. We will also touch briefly on the future of blogs and search. In addition, many of the points we cover will apply no matter what the context of the blog–classroom, library, information technology, alumni, marketing, etc.