Social networking, is there a place for it in academia?

[Scott Watkins]

The College of Education has been discussing ways to integrate social networking into our public relations initiative. Specifically, we're looking for ways to communicate with our various external and internal audiences on their terms. We've discussed MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc. but really haven't found any potential candidates to integrate into our current marketing. What are some of the things that you are using in the way of social networking to reach out to your audiences? What is working; what isn't? Is there even a place for social networking in University/College marketing efforts?

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Scott, insofar as the university and its students, staff and faculty are trying to promote themselves and their work, I think social networking is vital. The university as a whole, and individuals who are part of it, need to have a fully developed web presence as part of that promotion. Having a web presence is essential if you are going to reach out to people with whom you rarely or perhaps never have face-to-face contact with, and a web presence is also important in combination with face-to-face contact: a web presence can reinforce that contact (when professors publish their conference presentations online, for example), and it can expand that contact (for example, if I meet someone and tell them about what my online courses are like, I can then direct them to see all my course materials online).

There are so many great things to promote at OU - student achievements, faculty and staff achievements, exciting events, research initiatives, philanthropy, and so on - and I don't think we should have to wait for an email from David Boren with bad news about the budget in order to get an update on all the big things that are happening at OU (I learned about some great new things at OU from that recent email - things I had not heard about before, even though I am an assiduous reader of the OUDaily online, thanks to its RSS feed). We should be getting a continuous STREAM of information about what's going on at OU. Nifty social networking tools (and web2.0 tools in general) can then allow people to configure that stream of information, based on their own interests and affiliations with OU.

I view all of my courses at OU as social networks - networks that exist intensely for a semester (the students love interacting with each other by publishing websites and blogs - they are such social creatures, and fascinated by what other students are doing and thinking), but also networks that stretch out OVER TIME. With each passing semester, my archive of student work is an expanding network of knowledge, always getting bigger, broader, better. My students all publish their work as websites, not as traditional papers, and most of them leave their websites online after the class is over. When someone enrolled in my class currently wants to do a project on werewolves, say, or the goddess Aphrodite, or the Hindu concept of Dharma, I am able to refer them to previous work done by students in these classes, so they can learn from those students... and, in a healthy spirit of competitiveness, strive to do as well or even better than those previous students.

In a sense, I am "marketing" my course expectations to my students - and right in the first week of class, I can show them what they can hope to achieve with some hard work during the semester. It's effective marketing, too - they are sold absolutely on the possibility of building their own website, even though few of the students have any experience in doing that. They are excited by seeing the achievements of students past, and want to contribute their own work to the net-work.

The network of knowledge represented by this digital archive has transformed my classes, improving the quality of them dramatically year by year. I never had that ability to create a "network" in the classroom, without the digital persistence provided by web publishing. Now just imagine how it would be if students published web projects for ALL their classes, with web-based portfolios of all their work - what amazing things the university could brag about then!

Here are links to the archives for my three online courses:
Myth-Folklore (the biggest of the three)
Indian Epics (my medium-sized class)
World Literature (the smallest class, as its lower-divisio

[Scott Watkins]

Wow. I think what you're doing is great. Archiving past works, but keeping them 'live', can sure help others. I definitely feel that RSS feeds and email subscriptions are essential to maintain contact with various audiences. However, it's difficult to really analyze the effectiveness of these tools. My thinking is that you have to put yourself out there in various venues to really be sure you're reaching the largest segment of your target market. I've heard of other Universities and Colleges putting their promotional material in YouTube videos, creating MySpace and Facebook pages, etc. However, does using these tools strengthen or weaken your credibility with the target audience? Also, how can these tools be used effectively to foster communication between a large educational institution and a prospective student or even a prospective donor?

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Scott, one thing I've noticed is that while there are segments of the university who might not be interested in YouTube, or perhaps have never heard of RSS, the fact that you use YouTube or RSS is not going to be viewed as a negative thing. You reach different audiences with different tools - and I don't think you ever lose an audience by expanding your repertoire of tools.

The trick, of course, is finding tools that are quick and easy to use, don't have lots of overhead in time or other resources, and which can be UPDATED easily. I would say the biggest peril is not that people use different online venues, but the fact that they start to use a venue, and then abandon it or don't update it. That is definitely something that conveys a bad message to the audience that finds you - so I'm very keen on wikis and blogs and RSS feeds because they are inherently easy to update, unlike websites, which can become out of date very quickly. If an academic department, say, has a blog for departmental events, and someone can update that blog once a week (easy-peasy), you then have the RSS feed for the blog, which can automatically propagate itself throughout so many systems: RSS can go out via email to people who want email (I use Feedburner for my class announcements blog so those students who want email notifications can get them), it can be rendered into a webpage via javascript (for people who prefer webpages - the blog automatically updates your webpage for you), or it can be read in an RSS feed reader (although not so many people at university seem to have hooked into the power of RSS feed readers).

Since I'm a total RSS junkie, I probably should go start a discussion about that. I'm curious how people are making use of RSS at OU - the only big RSS project I know is David Corbly's super RSS service for new book acquisitions at the Library, which is so cool.

[Kerry Magruder]

This is a great discussion. Thanks, Scott and Laura.

Does anyone know much about the social networking capabilities of the new OU CMS that most academic departments are supposed to transition over to during the coming year? Is anyone presently using its calendars, photo galleries, blogs and rotating content? I assume it supports rss? (I do most of my web browsing through the NetNewsWire rss reader.) Are there other social networking features that it will support, and if so, how do they compare to other unofficially sponsored approaches like MySpace and ning? How are academic departments preparing their program websites for this transition?

By the way, another example of reaching out to audiences, again by David Corbly, Don Gilstrap and others in the library, is a great library video podcast that's available at iTunes.

[Scott Watkins]

I can't say I'm at all familiar with the new CMS. We decided to forego the OU CMS because we wanted to get our new site up ASAP and built a custom CMS into it. Therefore, I've not had much reason to jump in on the discussions regarding it. I would like to find a way to integrate our current events calendar into the CMS or syndicate in another way. If there will be decent support for social networking in the new CMS, this may help to sway us towards the new platform.

[Laura Gibbs]

I'm really interested in calendar applications that have cellphone notifications - I'm going to be using GoogleCalendar with my classes in the fall exactly because I think my students can really benefit from cellphone notifications about deadlines. I don't use a cellphone myself, but I know my students live by it.

I was also really pleased to discover I can mass upload all my semester information in one fellswoop with a csv file into Google Calendar. My students can then subscribe (or not), get email notifications, or cellphone notifications - even multiple notifications - for the calendar events (class deadlines). Again, it's their choice, because they each depend on their own combination of technologies (yeah for the user-centered web...)

By comparison, the calendar in Desire2Learn seems to have no notifications at all, which means it really is not very useful for my purposes. The problem is that my students forget to log on to Desire2Learn in time to get their work done...

Anyway, I'm excited about this as a new thing to try for Fall semester: my students often fail to get their work done on time (I'm super strict about deadlines), so I'm going to try to use the power of Google to help them help themselves!

Here are the notes I wrote up about Google Calendar when I was playing around with it a couple weeks ago. I created a test calendar there with an event every single day so people could play around with the subscription/notification options to see how it worked. I was very pleased with how user-friendly the whole thing was. :-)

[Mark Walvoord]

Not sure of any social networking capabilities in the new CMS at OU; I haven't found or used any so far, anyway...
Perhaps one of the WebComm folks (Erin is now a member of this Ning!) can enlighten us! :)

[mario]

I feel that "social media" has a place here at OU. The main reason is that our prospective and current students are familiar with brands such as YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, etc. IF these are used properly they can be an effective means of communication to supplement our existing communications materials.

I have been in contact with Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Ohio State about their YouTube channels. All universities that are knee-deep in social media have had success with them. They also have full-time staff devoted to their upkeep ;-)

What kinds of "Social Networking" tools would be helpful in the CMS and how would we use them?

[Scott Watkins]

We've (College of Education) talked about setting up a notification system Facebook App to allow our students to install in their profiles that would allow us to 'push' information to them. We would set up different apps to pull content that would be specific to the program in which they're enrolled, so it could be highly targeted. This would serve as another avenue of connection with our students (We currently have RSS feeds as well as an announcements section on the site). Does anyone feel this would be beneficial to develop and have any additional ideas that might prove useful?

If this would be useful, maybe integrating events/announcements from the University calendar into some sort of social app could be implemented into the new CMS.

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Scott, I am so glad to hear you all are talking about ways to make use of Facebook, since this is something that has me really stymied: I know my students, most of them anyway, are avid Facebook users, but I have not figured out how to harness that. I had started a Forum discussion about that, hoping especially to get some help about whether INSTITUTIONAL accounts can be created on Facebook, or whether it has to be "me," my own personal profile, which is try to use as a Facebook entryway. I'd really like to have my classes, not me, have the Facebook profile, friending, and all of that. Is it possible? If you could share what you've learned about Facebook here or over in the Facebook forum I had created here at the ning, I would be really grateful! :-)

[Scott Watkins]

Facebook has set up what they call 'Facebook Pages' to allow businesses, non-profits, organizations, etc. to take advantage of the Facebook phenomenon. You can learn more and even browse some other pages from the following link:

http://www.facebook.com/business/?pages