For those of you attending the NAGAP session on Tools, Tips, and Tricks in Personal and Workgroup Productivity, welcome! Here is a link to the wiki where the session materials are based.

Tools, Tips, and Tricks in Personal and Workgroup Productivity

Sunny San Diego was the setting for my NACUBO presentation this morning with Brendon Connelly of George Fox University. For the talk entitled “Tools, Tips, and Tricks for Workgroup Productivity, we hit a few key web-2.0 type tools that people from world of student financial services might find cool and useful - mindmaps, screencasts, wikis, and RSS.

Well, you can check it out too, because we did the whole talk from a public wiki. There are lots of links and examples, plus a screencast on how to set up Google Reader, an Ajax-y RSS reader that feels a lot like Gmail.

Here’s the link.

Tools, Tips, and Tricks for Workgroup Productivity

It was great to meet so many folks from the financial side of the university. What resonated with them? For starters — the idea of wikis for helping organize internal policies, and screencasts to help students learn how to complete complex forms.

On Thursday, Rob Pongsajapan and I will be leading a panel at the SNCR fall event in Boston. The panel will feature representatives from three institutions who’ve implemented successful blogging programs at their institutions, and who we’ve interviewed in-depth within the last few months. Here are the topics and questions we’ve asked the panelists to be prepared to address. The emphasis of the study is on generating best practice recommendations for the higher ed community, so the questions here will be oriented towards perceived outcomes for selected approaches. The full questionnaire we’ve been using in the study is much lengthier, but we’re limited here to 60 minutes and had to make choices. I’m expecting that one of us will be blogging the session.

Control

How do you strike the balance between providing a “true representation” and maintaining control of the blog? Is this an issue? What are your thoughts on official versus unofficial blogging?

Interaction
How would you characterize the level of interaction on the blog? What steps have you taken to increase interaction?

Platform

Do you use open source, paid, or home grown blogging software? Why did you select your particular type of blogging software?

Institutional presence/authority

Does the institution have a presence on the blog? How do you balance authority with authenticity?

Management, measurement, and evaluation

How can you tell whether blogging is right for your institution? Which tools/methods do you use to assess your blogging efforts? Quantitative/qualitative feedback?

The Orlando Academic Impressions conference on interactive technologies turned out to be just the ticket to get revved up again about new media. I wish I’d had the opportunity to stay through the finish, but this morning’s case study workshop turned out to be a total blast. (And instead I’m sitting in the Orlando airport on a three-hour delay to Philly.) Many thanks to all of you for sharing your ideas and concerns about new media at your institutions. It was great meeting and spending four hours with you all. Heck, eight hours wouldn’t have been enough. I have a feeling that we’ll see some new blogs launch after this week. To quote Matthew Winkel, Bring it on!

Takeaways -

There are still lots of concerns about needing new staff to implement some of these initiatives, despite the fact that, for example, none of people in our admissions blogging study have had to add staff to pull off some great blogs. Mind you, some are compensating students, but it usually doesn’t amount to more than $500 per student per semester, or the equivalent. And about half aren’t compensating students at all.

Penn State and University of Florida have big time new media initiatives going - the size and shape of which you have to behold to appreciate. RSS, student video upload, audio and video podcast. And the pace at which new content publishes is staggering. Penn State’s news office, for example, is second in output in Pennsylvania only to the Philly Inuirer, and I bet it won’t be long before they’re #1. No wonder they have great Google juice — the Google news crawlers must love them.

Matthew Winkel says your institution or organization needs to be pumping out at least 100 RSS feeds. I’m not sure how he arrived at that number, but it seems like the right place to start. A year ago, there would have been gasps all around the room. Today, there were nods of agreement. Three or four people raised their hands indicating their institution or organization has at least 100 feeds. I was one of them.

Paul Baker reminds us of the importance of remembering basic communication principles as we go about implementing new media. He’s right on the money. Too often we get caught chasing the shiny objects of new media and forget about business planning, audiences, stakeholders, etc. I thought today’s session showed a nice balance.

There’s still the impression that RSS is a bit obscure. I’ve been using it so long, I tend to forget that feeling. I think it was Steve Rubel who recently expressed disappointment about the state of RSS aggregators and ease of use, compared to advances in some other areas. I think I have to agree that it often takes some explaining. That said, I should report that we’re seeing really nice usage against the feeds of college and graduate school information available on Petersons.com, and use seems to be on the rise - this with zero promotion other than displaying icons where feeds are available.

All in all, a great event. I’m back to the office for a few days, then off to Boston for the SNCR gig for the panel on admissions blogging best practices.

10/27 UPDATE: Check out the summaries and thoughts from session faculty Paul Baker and Charlie Melichar.

This is a note for those attending the case study series on new media as part of the Academic Impressions event taking place in Orlando on Thursday morning, but the rest of you are free to read, too.

Presenting cases that morning are Matthew Winkel (RSS), Paul Baker (Blogging), and Joe Hice (Podcasting). I’ve been asked to facilitate. There’s some time budgeted to introduce the case studies and get people revved up. It’s a relatively small group (20 or so), and so I’ve decided to put you to work, so to speak. Each of you, I’ll venture to say, is there because you’re considering implementing some kind of new media program at your own institution, or tweaking an existing one. (I hope I’m not far off!)

So here’s the idea. I’m going to ask each of you to write and present your own mini case summaries, but in doing so you’re going to have to project yourself to October in the year 2007, after you’ve successfully implemented the new media initiative you’re imagining. It’s not going to be an easy thing, but there’s going to be help from the presenters, and help from fellow colleagues in attendance. It seems like a good way to get starting thinking about your own context and plans as they relate to the cases being presented, and also a good way to help the presenters learn about what you’re all up to. Of course, we will declare everything off the record.

The spirit of new media begs us to create our own futures. Do you agree?

See you there!

I’m looking forward to the inaugural Society for New Communications Research Research Symposium on Nov. 1-2 in Boston. As a fellow with the society, I’ve been working to help develop practice recommendations surrounding corporate and institutional blogging.

We’ve assembled a panel from Higher Education for this cross-industry event in November. Nancy Prater (Ball State), Glenna Ryan (RPI), and Daniel Fredman (University of Vermont), each of whom runs a successful admissions blogging effort, will be there to share what they’ve learned. Rob Pongsajapan and I will be moderating and sharing some of what we’ve learned in our interviews with these three and others in the last few months.

I’m also looking forward to the awards celebration, where SNCR will recognize excellence in new media and communications efforts in a variety of sectors including Higher Education.

Hope to see you there.

This summer I had the privilege to speak at the Council of Graduate Schools New Deans Institute and Summer Workshop, held this time at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, MA.

The CGS folks were so kind as to post the PDF of my presentation on the state of new media and its relation to higher education communications and marketing. It was modestly titled “How New Media Are Changing Everything.”

I shot this sunrise pic featuring the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge in the early morning hours before my breakfast presentation, from the jogging path looping past the hotel along the Charles River. There’s a small yacht club and marina on the Charles, just behind the hotel.

Will Richardson announces the “first annual “K12 Online 2006″ convention for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice.”

It’s great to see online conferences catching on, particularly ones that focus on online social tools, as this one does. Ewan McIntosh, a keynoter for this K-12 event, also particpated in HigherEd BlogCon 2006.

By the way, we’re about to launch planning for next year’s HigherEd BlogCon, tentatively scheduled for April, 2007. We invite you to join us in the planning process by registering on the 2007 HigherEd BlogCon planning wiki.

It’s hard to believe it’s conference season again. (Does it ever end?) In late October I’ll be heading down to Orlando to help facilitate a series of case studies for an Academic Impressions conference on Interactive Technologies. Joe Hice, Paul Baker, Matthew Winkel, Dennis Miller, and Charlie Melichar are participating, among others. We’ll be looking at cases of all shapes and sizes, but mainly centering on the use of RSS, podcasts, and web video as communications tools. Effective implementation and measurement will be key themes. It’s great to see many of the big conference producers getting interested in new media. It’s also interesting to note that they’re scanning the blogosphere for potential speakers. Academic Impressions learned of me through this blog.

Andrew Careaga is organizing an upcoming CASE event on new media, scheduled for Philly in early mid-September. Karine Joly, who you know as Collegewebeditor, is a featured speaker. (Way to go, Karine!!!!) I won’t be able to make her session, but how about we all meet for dinner in Philly on the evening of September 14? Drop a comment or email me at dan.karleen@petersons.com. I can recommend some great restaurants!