It’s finally here! Summer, the iPhone, or my intro blog.
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
1 comment June 3rd, 2008
