Posts filed under 'Open Web Apps'
Greetings eduWEBians and other blog readers! It is my great pleasure to be your guest blogger this month, after a great experience at last year’s conference and as a fervent reader of the buzz blog.
I am Melissa Cheater, and I am a Senior Consultant in Social Media & Web Strategy at Academica Group Inc. With this post I am going to get the introductions out of the way, run through my company, and let you in on my background so you can see where I’m coming from with this month’s posts.
Academica Group 101
Academica Group started as a market research firm, Acumen Research, back in 1996. Acumen Research founded the University Applicant Survey(TM), which lead to the College Applicant Survey(TM), which is now the University/College Applicant Study(TM), which we fondly call the UCAS(TM) (pronounced “U-Kass”). The UCAS has grown into the largest applicant survey in North America and surveys 100,000 incoming university and college applicants each year. Since then, Acumen acquired a marketing firm as well as a creative + technology house and was reborn as Academica Group Inc - a Full Cycle Marketing(TM) firm specializing in higher education.
We offer market research, strategy, creative and technology solutions and have provided one or the other or all four to almost every major school in Canada. We run a free daily newsbrief that filters and digests the ten most relevant news stories related to PSE, particularly in Canada - which I invite you to join if it is relevant to you.
As far as technology goes, we love open source. We work primarily in Drupal but have also implemented with proprietary CMS as well as provided hard-code sites. We are the developers of SkoolPool, an applicant community on Facebook(R) with more than 9,000 student signups and a free package available to all schools so that your profile (which is already there, created by students) looks like A, instead of B.
A (Below)
B (below)
Me
I’m young, I’m a millennial, but I’m old enough to remember how to load California Games(TM) in DOS. I started a non-profit youth programming group when I was 17 and ended up being influential in municipal policy and writing for a Trillium grant on Youth Services. Other than Youth, my background is tightly linked to music and community. The Constantines played the first show I ever booked, and they are still one of my favourite live bands.
I started building sites in 1997 and haven’t stopped since. Geocities, to HTML, to Dreamweaver, to CMS & Wordpress. Other than my personal sites, I have worked with non-profits, government, and a several businesses and events. I’m an HTML kid who can throw down in almost any other language if you give me Google, notepad and an Internet connection. I’ve handled large-scale web updates and I’ve worked in an environment where web is a team under a team under a board under elected officials who need 1,000 pages updated in both national languages in the next 24 hours.
My education is media, and communication. If you want some applicant insight, I applied to the University of Western Ontario’s Media, Information & Technoculture program because I had paid for 5 application slots and thought technoculture was a funny word. Once the offers were in and I was faced with four years of accounting or business, I ended up going with the funny word.
I had the privilege of working with the Anonequity project as a rare undergrad assistant, and through this spent two years researching privacy, technology, the internet and public expectations with a national team of leading technology, sociology and law minds. When given my own lead, my contributions to this project rang to social networks (MySpace was emerging at the time), as well as data collection and privacy on children’s websites.
Other than that, I’ve worked with the University of Western Ontario - in the registrar’s office and in HR. I was hired on at Academica Group shortly after these two contracts and have been here ever since. I have spent the last year working closely with SkoolPool(TM). And I am the founding member of our Social Media Services department, where I continue to be.
In exchange for this incredibly long & boastful introduction, here are the slides from a presentation Chris Skinkle & I gave last week at the CAUCE 2008 conference here in London: “Engaging Mature Students in the age of Facebook, YouTube & Wikipedia”
Reach me:
email | web | blog | facebook | twitter | del.icio.us | skype: MelissaAcademica
June 3rd, 2008
In my final post as May guest blogger, I wanted to say “thanks” to all of you who work so hard on your websites, especially the web content managers. In an earlier post I said that your website is your institution’s most valuable asset. Well, I’d like to correct that and say that I believe it’s actually you who should be considered your institution’s most valuable asset. Why? Well, consider this…
According to the most recent statistic I can find on Google and Netcraft, there are approximately 43 billion web pages on the World Wide Web today. Those pages are served by about 158 million unique websites. That’s an average of about 272 web pages per website. Now, according to Google, there are about 758 million web pages representing approximately 5,000 higher educational websites (.edu sites). That’s an astonishing 152,000 web pages, on average, per college site, or approximately 56,000% more pages than the average site on the World Wide Web.
Using these facts and figures, and excluding only the largest e-commerce and media related websites, it’s clear that there are no harder working individuals on the planet than you!
Given the extraordinary effort you and your team make on a daily basis, I have yet to find a single one of you that wants to complicate their job further with burdensome technology. My work revolves around your web content management software (CMS) needs, and over the years I’ve seen a lot of web CMS technologies make a lot of promises. The biggest failing of most of these technologies is that they often make managing content more challenging than before — not something you need!
So, our goal at OmniUpdate has been to keep our web CMS extremely easy to use; yet powerful as a technical engine. We designed it in 2001 exclusively for higher education; consequently, we understand how different your problems are from business and e-commerce sites. Our design ensures WYSIWYG ease of use for everyone involved, plus complete separation of content from design, version control and roll-back, content repurposing, and all the specs even the most hardened techie would love.
Why is this CMS approach important? Consider the fact that:
- IT staff benefit from a standards based approach to web CMS. XML and XSL are the backbone of Web 2.0 and at the very core of OmniUpdate’s templating system.
- Administrators benefit from the ability to control permissions and manage actions at a department and/or individual level — it’s a powerful capability (and very important) to decide and implement “who can do what” on your website.
- Recruiting, admissions, public relations and marketing staff benefit from all the communication and messaging features previously described earlier in this series: blogs, RSS, video, online chat, etc. (Yes, one CMS can do all that!)
- Decision-making committees appreciate a user-based pricing model that is scalable with flexible terms, and would like to purchase one product that delivers all the previously described benefits and functionalities.
OmniUpdate is used today by website heroes just like you to update the content on over 450 college and university websites. And there’s no doubt in my mind that YOU are your institution’s most valuable asset.
I look forward to meeting you at the eduWeb Conference in July.
Lance Merker
May Guest Blogger
CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com
May 30th, 2008
For the past few months I have been following the exploits over at Juicy Campus and more recently some of the reaction to it. If you haven’t read Juicy Campus, it is a little bit like Twitter for the lascivious college set (that actually sounds a little more thrilling than it actually is). I am not quite sure what to make of JC as we all move closer and closer to bringing more open web apps into our dot edu spaces: see the new University of Maryland homepage, which grants a chunk of real estate to You Tube, iTunes, etc. I think that is a good thing for sure, but where does the line exist between those community apps and Juicy Campus or Rate My Professors? I suspect we mostly have enough common sense to draw that line on our own.
There was quite a bit of talk over controlling message in dot edu spaces at last summer’s conference. The overwhelming theme at the conference was to open up dot edu to these more open web apps, but I fear that web-based petrie dishes like Juicy Campus will further crystallize that fear we see in the eyes of communications directors and admissions officers when we talk about opening our web presence.
So, yikes. What do you all think?
Ted Simpson
March Guest Blogger
Director, Technologist, Dragoman & Project Manager
Maryland Institute College of Art
tsimpson@mica.edu
March 6th, 2008
