Via EducationPR comes this lengthy interview on youth, MySpace, and other social media with Henry Jenkins and danah boyd.

Bob Robertson-Boyd, who’s been part of our “Conversations” Skypecast since the beginning a few weeks ago, is hosting a Skypecast of his own from the NetSquared conference on Wednesday. The NetSquared Conference explores new media and social change.

Our latest graduate school search, launched earlier today, supports del.icio.us tagging at the result list level. For example, students can easily share a list of graduate program disciplines offered at schools in Los Angeles or a list of molecular biology programs in LA, or for that matter, a master list of disciplines where searchers can find programs in biological and biomedical sciences.

No Skypecast today. I’m hoping to launch a planned mini-series, perhaps based around several live interviews, kinda like radio, except everyone can participate.

Got something interesting to talk about? Trying out social media at your institution? Let me hear from you!

danah boyd, the social media researcher, predicted it: legislation requiring libraries and schools to “protect minors from commercial social networking websites and chat rooms” such as MySpace, AIM, Xanga, Blogger, and Flickr. It would also apply to message boards. As non-commercial sites, school sites themselves would be excluded. But how this would effect university libraries and computer resources, which can be used by minors, remains to be seen. For those of you in higher education using these kinds of sites and tools to communicate with prospective students, or for those of you in the high school ranks who may use these sites in teaching and advising, how will this impact your ability to communicate, teach, and learn about your community, if suddenly many students are blocked? Are students you encounter using these sites from home, or from their school or library? I suspect this may be a topic of conversation on today’s Skypecast.

Just a quick reminder about Friday’s Skypecast at 1pm EDT. Assuming we get the call going and all the technical issues out of the way, it would be great to get a discussion going on communities and conversations. “Conversation Strategies” is a clunker of a title, so perhaps we can talk about a name, too. If you want to see what I’m interested in, just check out my recent post about conversational marketing. Betsy at Techsmith, if you’re reading this, please feel free to hop on the call.

Looks like Karine and several others have expressed interest. I’ve also sent an email to someone in the community who was in the early Skypecast beta group, hoping he has some time and interest.

Hope to talk to you then!

Somehow I missed that Dan Forbush had posted a summary/transcript of the April 17 HigherEd BlogCon chat “New Media in Admissions” featuring Brendon Connelly, Dimitri Glazkov, Kim Gregson, Sean McKay, Dennis Miller, and Nancy Prater as panelists. Thanks for posting this, Dan!

Here are some of the highlights.

You can’t build a super-cool myspaces and think that the students will completely migrate over to it, but you can hope that when they come to your site, they will engage in a conversation.

The role of the university might be to encourage virtual social spaces where they have not been available before. Not as a replacement for Facebook, etc. but to offer something those services can’t — particularly if you have some signature events or activities like a university-wide service project or student-abroad program.

Marketing has to reflect reality. It’s getting harder to fake it when so much of our real communication is happening via open mediums like blogs.

The biggest change will be students demanding transparency in the recruiting process and openness on the part of officials, whether it’s via blogging or what.

I think it took higher ed a long time to realize that higher education is a market. The next change is realizing that markets are conversations.

Shel and Neville talk about how businesses will need to change in response to the next-generation workforce raised on blogs and social networks. I say–and I think David Warlick would agree–that colleges and universities may have even less time to get ready. Check out some of the grade-school teacher testimonials on David’s blog concerning student use of blogs.

Just when we thought we had mastered podcasting, Michael Arrington points us to new forms that could be considered social podcasting. Waxxi let you create a podcast with participants calling into a phone number. We mentioned Skypecasts recently. And Podserve offers a way to create feeds that a group of people can contribute to. Many of the strongest objections to podcasting come from the “conversational” camp who’ve felt that podcasts as a medium are too one-way. No longer.

Imagine how these media could transform the concept of a classroom. Students (and instructors) studying at a distance can call an 800-number or, better yet, sign onto their Skype account, dialogue with the rest of the class, get the whole thing recorded and then syndicated for those who missed, those who want to review, or those who happen to join a class later in the semester. The tools to integrate simultaneous whiteboard- or screen-sharing can’t be far behind.

(Link via Scoble.)

Does the world need yet another place to hold virtual meetings? Skype is betting so, and people are already signing up to use a new free service called Skypecast. I’ve created a meeting for this Friday, May 12, at 1 PM EDT titled Conversation Strategies where we can talk about–you guessed it–how we can use Skypecasts as to create a forum where we can talk about creating conversation spaces in Higher Education.

This space is yours to shape, so please join us to talk about what it can be. It will also be a way to test and get comfortable with the new service and also discuss future meetings. Joining the meeting is free. All you need is the latest beta version of Skype. I’m looking for volunteers to help moderate future sessions. Any takers?

Did I mention that it’s free?