I’m a big fan of Ning, and lately I’ve been gearing up to launch an Alumni site in it. The first email invites will go out tomorrow.

Well, not exactly the first invites. And therein lies a story.

See, before I launched this, I tried a little experiment and invited a few of my alumni friends to a prototype site. The site grew by leaps and bounds until it reached 31 members, most of them not invited by me. Many invited by people not invited by me.

There were postings, reconnections, forums. For that period of time people were addicted, clearly stopping by the site obsessively. From February 13 to March 20, it was *the* place to be.

Then suddenly — not so much. I mean *really* not so much. Everybody disappeared, almost overnight.

There’s a number of reasons, I think. One being that initial activity was heavily about reconnecting and once new people stopped coming in, the site died. Another being that at thirty-one members, the site was just too small. The people that post the majority of content in things like these seem to number about one or two in a hundred — at 31 people, the flow of content was too unstable. (At Blue Hampshire we got well over a thousand members, and 600 readers a day, but the site is still dependent on 12 or so regulars who post).

I also think that a lot of times you set it up to have this explosive activity, but after the dust settles if you did it on a large scale you’re left with your regulars. So some amount of contraction is expected.

Still, I can’t help thinking of that Annie Hall quote about the shark (first 10 seconds of this trailer):

Do online social networks have to keep on moving forward or they die? It’s definitely something we’ll be looking at as we launch the alumni site. There’s nothing more unattractive than a dead shark.
 

[Cross-posted in part at the Online Communications Blog] 

Good article today forwarded to me by Jenny Darrow asking whether sites like keene.edu are becoming increasingly irrelevant as marketing tools.

The answer is obvious to anyone that’s ever looked at their Google Analytics: yes, absolutely. You can see this clearly in the statistics — students come in and do a couple things in very fast succession:

1. Check tuition cost
2. Check financial assistance information
3. Maybe, though hardly ever, check to see if we offer a specific degree. (They almost never look for information about the degree — the question is simply whether we have that degree).

Then it’s to a decision point — send me the application, apply online, or, in the case of Keene State — schedule a campus tour (the option we really push, since it seems to be the most beneficial to the student and to us).

Why this surprises people I have no idea. But it continues to surprise people, who wonder why we don’t put reams of material about program X or Y in between that student hitting the home page and the link to the campus tour.

The answer is that the student applying here has already made their decision before they hit the home page — or at least made enough of a decision to schedule a campus tour. Marketing information has to be done well on a site like keene.edu — but it’s in broad strokes — they’ve come in sold on taking that tour, assuming you handle that last five yards well.

[This isn’t always the case with parents, who are often perusing the materials looking for the general “tone” of the college, but that’s a post for another day].

So what is that decision based on? This decision to give you a chance that’s made before they even type “Keene State College” into Google?

It’s reputation. Word of mouth, the comments on Facebook or MySpace, Livejournal articles, what they saw on YouTube, what their high-school friends that came here last year told them. And maybe even importantly for this generation, it’s what their parents may have heard on NHPR, or seen in the Concord Monitor, Newsweek, or USA Today.

And eventually, if we let it, it’s through perusing the artifacts of the truly Visible University — YouTubes of recitals, videos of football games, discussion boards of classrooms, student projects posted online.

So in a world we we cannot control what prospective students (and donors) see about us, what’s left for us to do? 

I believe the key is to engage those channels in an honest and helpful way, through embracing transparency and creating a culture of engagement. In a post .edu world, that’s where our message has to go.

More on how to do that later. But give the article a gander, it’s five paragraphs, and a good starting point.

The amount of stuff Ning gets right is impressive, but they’re still blinded by tradition — and few things demonstrate this more than their forum/blog division.

Want to know the question my members on my local Ning site ask me most often?

“Should I do this as a forum or a blog?”

And all I’m able to do is throw up my hands in frustration. By maintaining weird divisions between blogs (which are posted text + discussion) and forums (which are posted text + discussion) the creators of Ning have created a dilemma where there should be none.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just duplication. But the hidden ways in which these are different require just too much understanding of how Ning works: 

1. Forums give you 15 minutes to edit your comment before it is locked (a fact which initially led me to use them for everything), blog comments are locked against changes immediately.
2. Blogs ping services like Technorati, forums don’t. This is particularly annoying in running a public information site — it means the time sensitive comment in the educational funding forum is unlikely to get indexed when it matters, where as the blog post about one’s new cat goes out immediately.
3. Groups can only do forums, so if you want your thing categorized under a group name, a blog post is out.
4. Comments on blogs are called comments, on forums they are called “replies”.
5. Forum comments can be nested, blog comments can’t.
6. On the front page, forums show who the last reply was by to the forum — a great tool to get you to realize there’s more to respond to than the original post. Blogs just tell you the number of comments.
7. Blogs on the front page say the exact time they were posted — forums just tell you the day.
8. Clicking on a member name on the forum blurb on the front page lists all posts and comments a person has made. Clicking on a member name on the blog post blurb takes you to their profile page.

This is barely scratching the surface. As a person with quite a  background in blogging and forums it’s confusing to me — so no wonder people with less background are tearing their hair out about it.

I understand the idea that Ning must be working with — that blogs are somehow about authors, and forums are about commenters.

But IMHO, that’s a 2006 understanding of blogging. The point is, most of the time at the point you post in a community you don’t know whether the value will end up being about the post or the comments.

That “in a community” bit is crucial. Look at the stuff that has grown up around Daily Kos, AutoblogGreen, and other community sites. Sometimes it’s a conversation, and sometimes it’s people dutifully responding to the meat of a post. But you really don’t know which it is until it all shakes out.

So why not unify these two things, instead of maintaining this false and confusing seperation? Make it all blogging, and incorporate some of these differences into admin settings?

Feel free to respond to the post in the comments, or just discuss it among yourselves. Whichever.

There’s a story that Will Robinson tells, perhaps apocryphal,  about a student that took their first draft of a paper, and posted it to Wikipedia. After a week or so they took it down, newly edited, fact checked and sourced.

Well, maybe this will work, and maybe it won’t, but I’m involved in writing an academic technology vision statement (along with compratriot Jenny Darrow), and I couldn’t help but think of that story. Why labor in the dark when so many people smarter than me read this blog?

So I’d like to invite any of you that read this and have ideas about what an Academic Tech Vision document should look like to comment over at:

http://atvision.pbwiki.com

The password is highway61. You can upload your own idea of a vision plan, or comment on ours. The idea is, if this is sucessful, to create our plan in a way that is a testament to net-enabled methods of creation.

And it it fails… well, I think it’s a noble act to attempt to eat your own dogfood. So we’ll soldier on. But I really do invite all the people that stop by here occasionally to comment or post their own idea on the wiki… that crowd includes, but is not limited to, Stephen Downes, Jon Udell, Jim Groom, Martha Burtis, Andy Rush, Leigh Blackall, Bernard Lunn, Royce Robertson, Richard Nantel, Jeff McClurken, Artichoke, Nils Peterson, Harold Jarche, Scott Wilson, Jerry Slezak, Gardner Campbell, Bill Fitzgerald, etc. (sorry I don’t have time to link all those names).

Actually looking at that list of people who have commented or linked here, I’m suddenly struck by how blessed this blog, at less than six months old, has been. It’s kind of overwhelming, really: you get any two people from that above list together, and you probably have a brain trust. Three and it’s a think tank.

So let me add that whether you help Jenny and I out with comments or not, I’m really just stunned how gracious people have been with their comments and links to date, and grateful.

So maybe see you over there? (And if you want to sport a link to the project and invite your own friends to help, as always, very much appreciated…)

http://atvision.pbwiki.com

password: highway61

(The best address to reach me at is caulfield.mike@gmail.com if you have any questions. And yes, after I get this done, I WILL finish the Pecha Kucha project.).

So we’re about 20 hours into this week, and so far I’ve spent over 10 of those hours on drafting an academic technology plan for my institution.

I have trouble explaining why it’s so hard to draft, but perhaps if you’ve ever tried to tie a policy document into the greater fabric of policy documents at your college or large corporation, you’ll understand. What seems to be happening is I’m coming at this downward, from the broad objectives of the college, and then trying to fit my thinking into that framework. Like all policy documents, it has to be a bit of a magic trick — I have to show how the aims of the college have led to this approach to technology the whole time.

But of course, my understanding of technology doesn’t really descend from the aims of the college. It comes from a lifetime of solving problems using computers and networks, from ten years of applying technology to “academic” problems, and from political blogging, where it’s become really apparent to me that even in areas where problems are not technical that a creative orientation to technology can quite literally allow students to change the world.

So here, completely off the top of my head, 15 minutes before the meeting where I will present my tortured institutional draft of the AT plan — here is what I would *like* to it to say:

We’ll use technology to help students and faculty to change the world. Sometimes that means pulling together people to colloborate and solve a sticky problem. Sometimes it means providing a service that no one has thought to provide. Sometimes it means setting up a Learning Management System to automatically import a student roster so that a professor can spend that time with students instead of Excel. Ultimately if you can show us an interesting problem, we can tell you how technology and network thinking can address it better. The more it would improve the world relative to the effort required, the higher it goes in the queue.

We’ll graduate students who think creatively about technology and loose processes. Today’s world belongs to the systems analyst, the person who understands that a loose process is as much a machine as a tightly programmed circuit board. The person that understands where it makes sense to encode a process in a circuit board, and where it makes sense to encode a process in a short verbal agreement. The person that knows how to evaluate a process as a whole, and swap out the defective or inefficient bits, and improve what they do incrementally. Our students when confronted with a task won’t ask where the application is that can do it for them — they’ll assemble new and old technologies in front of them, like a chef reverse engineering a recipe. And they’ll start to mix.

We will bring our own institution (and our learning) into the Networked Age. The Information Age has been supplanted by the Network Age. And while that network is technology-mediated, the ramifications of this transition exceed technology. Students will graduate into jobs that don’t exist yet. They don’t need facts. They need to learn to use the network to learn. We’ll stop teaching them in ways they will never encounter again, and embrace our mission of showing them ways to learn which they can use over their lifetime. This means more wikis and less lecture halls, more Just-in-Time learning, more distributed knowledge. What they need is on the network. Let’s show them how to get it.

==== 

Well, times up.  Have to head to this thing now. That’s not complete, but it’s amazing what you can write in 15 minutes if you start from the direction you entered the issue. And it’s amazing how many hours it takes to write against the grain….

Been trying out Brightcove as a video service. Test film follows below:

If anyone has any thoughts on the use of Brightcove, please share.

I think this video does a nice job of showing what a museum a university education has become:

(h/t Andy Rush)

So after all the political stories I’ve labored over, I finally made front page on Huffington Post — with a story I wrote in 5 minutes while downing my morning coffee.

Oh well, I’ll take it! Thanks to the Off The Bus crowd who have been pushing hard to get these stories by amateurs like me better placement.

…and it’s not even that hard.

I’ve said before that one of the fundamental things the university has not come to terms with is that in an environment where failure is inexpensive, undergraduates can be pushed to solve real problems, rather than to practice solving problems they might encounter once they get out of college.

In the world of net-enabled education, this is possibly the most important differentiator.  And it will change the face of undergraduate education.

The product that colleges will be giving you in twenty years is not a degree, but a reputation. The number of students that have done something significant and public in undergrad will hit a critical mass, so much so that the reputation of colleges will be largely determined by what they helped their students do while the students were under their mentoring.

Here’s the thing: people in higher education often object — “But our students aren’t that smart! Not everybody can be an entrepreneur!”

Or they say something else with more syllables, but they mean that.

They are wrong.

Case in point — the hottest New Hampshire political blog right now is not Blue Hampshire or GraniteGrok. It’s New Hampshire Presidential Watch, a blog run by a St. Anselm’s undergrad.

What is it that attracts visitors?  Incisive political analysis? Horse race statistics? Round the clock reporting?

Nope. What the kid who runs it does is take all the emails and other info he gets from all the Presidential candidates, and does the painful but absolutely essential work of organizing it into a single calendar. And because he’s become the destination site to find out who’s in the state, candidates now send him the updates. And because he now has an audience, he *can* do political reporting, and be read by thousands.

No algorithms. No advanced marketing plan. Just someone saying to a kid, you know, I wish I didn’t have to go to 16 different sites to figure out who was in town, and the kid thinking: I can solve that.

The talent is not in the compilation of these materials. It’s in that impulse: I can solve that. And because this impulse is what fuels the new economy, this kid will never want for a job. He will graduate Saint A’s, and the degree will be a footnote to what he already accomplished.

He’ll graduate with a reputation.

You can call it service, or entrepreneurship, or academic engagement; in truth, it’s all three.

What you can’t call it is idealistic. It’s here and now. It’s happening. And there’s absolutely no reason not to embrace it.

I know it’s good form to say where you’ve been when you disappear off the face of your blog for two weeks.

Answer: bilge-pumping.

That said, we’ll try to do better next time.

Now onto to other things.

A side project I do got some news coverage this past Sunday. And it was a pretty nice article in that they represent our political community site fairly well. (I wish sometimes they’d focus on how hard it is to do this with so little spare time, but oh well).

But the hook in these things is always so predictable I have to laugh. Here’s the final paragraphs:

“Bloggers are the new key influencers in the community. National bloggers are shaping opinions. They are engaged in the daily dialogue of national affairs and some voices are very influential,” Hynes said.

He said in New Hampshire for the 2008 election, three or four influential bloggers have emerged with “tier one” access to candidates – i.e. press credentials to cover events and interview the candidates – when many believed the blogging trend had plateaued.

“Bloggers will have a marginal effect, but a lot of races are decided in the margins,” he said.

I hate to pick on this article, because it got more stuff right than most. And they are just quoting Patrick Hynes a “blog outreach consultant” (Wow!) for John McCain. But much of the article follows the same philosophy, ticking off a list of types of access the campaigns give us, and saying isn’t it crazy? The world is upside down!

But it’s the press that has the battery wired backwards.

The reason blogging works is not because we’re so influential that we get access. The reason it works is that we don’t care about access. Frankly, we’re not corrupted by it. I receive so many invites to blogger conference calls I route them to a special folder. I hardly ever go. Why should I, when it’s just the candidate repeating the same talking points they just put out in a press release?

And I think it drives some campaigns crazy, but I don’t write stories off of press releases either. And although I get invited to “surrogate” events, for the most part I don’t go. I have no desire to see so and so’s daughter tell me how great their Dad is. Sorry. I just see that as another commercial.

Patrick Hynes, the blog outreach coordinator quoted, doesn’t know me, but I know his candidate. And that’s by design. I took a $119 video camera to an event of McCain’s last Sunday, and I sat in the back row, listening and filming.

I’ve been thinking about what I heard, and how he reacted to the audience questions. I’ve been thinking about which issues he dodged and which he didn’t, and how this might differ from his last spin through New Hampshire. I’ve been thinking about the reaction of people around me — people I might add that were the audience, not fellow reporters in some “press pen”.

All that “access”? Let’s be honest. The access beyond see the candidate in a Town Hall setting is spin control. It’s entry into the PR ecosystem.

And I have very little interest in it. Strip away credentials and access, and I’d argue what you get is better reporting.