Pushing the envelope in higher education is not always easy, so imagine the challenge when you want to transform the envelope into a zombie that wants to eat your students’ brains.
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HEWEB11 Wrap-Up
Much like the live music that made its host city famous, High Ed Web 11 jammed, from the early early morning till the early, early night. For four solid days.
I love higher education. But like any relationship, what originally attracts and enchants can later be irritating and disappointing.
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Panoramas: A How-To
Panoramas can be created easily using Photoshop, and can be a great addition to your normal photo rotation.
Web design has a simple goal: to convey to the user the desired message in the most effective manner possible. An infinite number of design possibilities exist; however, the “right” design choices rely on the web designer understanding the audience. When beginning a project, the team should determine the target audience of the piece. Once […]
Project management makes order of the chaos.
Routine. Drudgery. Burnout. They’re things we all fear or deal with when we work in an industry long enough. Little did I know those feelings would be hip-checked into oblivion by a group of women on wheels, in fishnets.
Social networks targeted to certain niches of the population — the smaller and less well-known sites — might also serve your institution’s goals.
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2011 Commencement Roundup
We’ve assembled a sampling of things #highered folks tackled this year. Professionals in departments ranging from IT to marketing and all shades in between forged ahead this year to expand all things communication surrounding commencement ceremonies.
As social media manager for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I frequently try out new platforms to see if our students are using them and if they might become useful tools for my campus. For the past 18 months, I’ve channeled my inner mayor on Foursquare, a location-based social network.
Web accessibility is an important aspect of the World Wide Web many of us develop, maintain and manage every day. An understanding of web accessibility is essential for anyone who produces content.
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In Defense of Human Tweeting
In August 2010, I made a simple change: I replaced the University of Rochester logo as the Twitter avatar with my own bespectacled mug, and was up front in the bio that the tweets were coming from me, Lori in Wallis Hall.
People go by many names and titles, be it web manager, specialist, strategist, master, maven, guru or overlord. Titles are about as useful as job descriptions in predicting what exactly you will do.
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Social Media Novice
New social media platforms were constantly discussed; I got tired of being left out of the conversation.
At the University of Michigan-Flint, a student-deemed #epicfail became an important lesson in the evolution of social communication. If there’s one danger in the realm of social media, it’s becoming comfortable and resting on laurels. The living, breathing social media beast needs constant attention, and so do its users.
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Google Analytics: Who Cares?
As an analytical person, Google Analytics was my playground when I began working with it 3 years ago. But, as my knowledge in higher-ed and web marketing was strengthened, I realized Analytics could do more than just ‘reports’.
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Stop the Presses
While it took me a while to get used to the quiet and the slower pace, over time I realized that my immersion in an online newsroom had uniquely prepared me for the challenges of higher-ed web communications. While the context, and what’s at stake, varies greatly between journalism and higher education, many of the same communication principles apply.
The number of social media platforms, user communities and interactive opportunities continues to grow. Budgets don’t. So how can communicators deal with this evolving landscape? One way is to use the most rich and robust resource available: students.
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Skywalkering It
In the summer of 2009, I was about done with higher ed. In two different jobs at two different colleges, I felt as though I was always being held back from doing all I could do online, mostly due to political nonsense that had nothing to do with meeting goals and objectives.