Next month at the conference of the National Association of Graduate Admissions Professionals I’ll be giving a talk on blogs, podcasts, and RSS in graduate recruiting. If your school or program is doing podcasts, blogs, or RSS feeds as part of graduate recruiting efforts, I’d love to hear from you. Email me at dan.karleen@thomson.com or post a comment here. If you are going to be at the conference or around Las Vegas during the week of April 24, let’s plan to meet!

So far, I’m looking at the following examples of these tools applied to graduate recruiting. (They’re in no particular order.) Do you know of others?

University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts podcast

Polytechnic University events feed

Westminster Choir College blog

Berkeley Haas School podcast

Harvard Law School blog

Wharton Blog

Kogod School Admission feed

UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism feed

University of Maine College of Engineering feed

Oregon State University Admissions blog

Alliance Theological Seminary

I’ve been buried with work on a variety of projects including HigherEd BlogCon, which launches April 3 and runs throughout the month. There are more than 30 schools and organizations represented, and a whole bunch of talented people organizing and presenting. I’m also working on several interviews that will be published as part of the event. So, no worries. Work is getting done, and normal blogging will resume shortly.

Fitchburg State College president announces admission acceptance via podcast.

…students download a ”podcast” — an audio and video file played on a mobile device or personal computer — that features President Robert Antonucci. In the video, Antonucci informs students they have been accepted and offers congratulations.

Georgia College & State University has come up with an innovative way identify ways of applying new technologies.

…the 5,500-student campus has organized a group of staff and faculty to conjure up other uses for the technology. Called the iDreamers, the team bats around ideas that could turn iPods into portable yearbooks and replace campus brochures with podcasts.

Save for a few contributors to be added, the final lineup for April’s HigherEd BlogCon is posted.

I think you’ll find it to be rather exceptional. Many thanks to the presenters, section chairs, and editors who are working so hard to pull this off!

We are still accepting candidates for examples of new media projects and applications in higher education. If you would like to make a nomination, please contact me by email (dan.karleen@thomson.com) or leave a comment on this post. We will post links and descriptions you provide on the conference blog. Please note that we are looking for examples of student-directed projects and applications as well.

A much overdue set of links for you….

Boston University launches the first NCAA video podcast (via Podcasting News). You can get the feed on this page.

We read a lot about college libraries getting into social media. Public libraries are also getting into blogging and RSS. Here’s the Madison-Jefferson County Public Library blog, links to RSS feeds at the lower right. There’s definitely a more global story waiting to be written here.

North Carolina State podcasting is taking off.

Chicago Tribune acknowledges the trend in blogging in the classroom. Unlike most MSM pieces on the subject, this one actually includes links to education bloggers and sites that can help people get started blogging. Nicely done.

Take a look at some short video interviews with speakers and attendees from this month’s New Communications Forum. Start with the Shel Israel interview (link goes to the Ourmedia.org page with the embedded player) and work your way through the other six, which are linked at the bottom of the page.

Kaplan has launched a series of podcasts. We’ve been doing test prep and college prep podcasts for more than a year.

A nice descriptive write-up, with specific how-to’s, on Consumer Idealized Design, which is based on the principles of idealized design first set forth by Russell Ackoff. It’s a longer article, but worth the read, particularly for those of us trying to figure out what the new web world means for business.

Librarystuff.net mentions that the University of Pennsylvania library is supporting catalog item tagging.

Vassar College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Case Western University have added feeds to the College and University Feed Directory.

Paul Baker, a public relations practitioner with Wisconsin Center for Education Research, has moved his blog to WordPress, and re-launched it as EducationPR, focusing now on “Technology for communicators in education.” In a recent post on classroom podcasts, he gives tips for making a good one–some good suggestions, I’d say, regardless of the educational level. Here’s the blog’s new RSS feed.

Thomson Peterson’s college search now supports easy tagging of pages via Del.icio.us, so that students can quickly share and refer to their schools of interest.

See the upper right corner of this page for Temple University.

To my knowledge, Thomson Peterson’s college search is the first to offer this feature.

Tags: college search, del.icio.us

Meredith Farkas, blogger at Information Wants To Be Free and Library and Information Resources Section Chair for HigherEd BlogCon, was recently interviewed on ALA TechSource about her work at Norwich University and the future of library services. Here are some choice excerpts.

…it can’t just be about technology. There are so many little things you can do to improve your services. I think step one is rethinking everything. Question why you are doing things the way you’re doing them. Question whether what you’re doing is really helping your patrons. Question EVERYTHING.

It’s great to have blogs and IM to communicate with patrons, but it’s much more important to create change where it’s needed most in your library.

The New Communications Forum spring 2006 event has ended, and it was a fantastic success. The weather in Palo Alto was exceedingly cooperative, the people friendly and energetic, the keynotes and sessions a helpful mix of theory, dialogue, and example. The program covered topics from basic blogging, podcasting, and wiki techniques to advertising strategies, search engine optimization, the changing world of mainstream media and journalism, and new challenges and opportunities for the corportate communicator.

It was the ideal setting in which to meet many with whom I’ve been working on Society for New Communications Research projects over the last several months, and to continue the discussions we’ve been having online. In particular, John Cass (another SNCR member) and I had a chance to discuss the next steps in advancing work he’s begun on assessing the state of corporate blogging policies. (John was also a panelist in a session covering blogs and SEO.)

It was also an opportunity to meet and speak with many whose work I’ve admired, including Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson, hosts of the For Immediate Release podcast, and the Forrester analyst and blogger Charlene Li, who was a keynoter. (I wasn’t able to attend Shel and Neville’s workshop on podcasting, but I’m told it was a huge success.)

There were also a few in attendance connected with the world of higher education, and I hope to post interviews with some of them in the coming weeks.

I’ve podcast conferences before, but never have I been as involved in live blogging as deeply as I was in blogging the Forum, something I did as part of my work with SNCR, which, it was announced last week, will assume ownership of the conference. Live blogging turns out to be a memory enhancer. I’m sure I’ll recall the sessions I live blogged much more effectively than those I didn’t. With the rapid pace of an event like this one, it’s a challenge to make live blogging rise above mere note-taking, but I hope I was successful in at least a few cases.

I’ve nearly concluded my assignment as a live blogger for the event. Here is a link to live posts from NewComm (my posts and a handful of others)–altogether more than twelve posts. In the coming days I’ll be posting video interviews I did with Nicole Simon, Shel Israel, Dan Forbush, and others during the event. You’ll be able to get them on this feed for NewComm posts.

According to the organizers, attendance at this year’s Forum doubled last year’s–an indication of the exploding interest in the use of blogs, podcasts, wikis, and other new media in communications. There’s a fall Forum being planned, most likely for Washington, DC.

Tags: NewComm Forum