University Business - January 2009 - (Page 39)

INTERNET TECHNOLOGY Real and eﬀective communication, 140 characters at a time By Karine Joly Should You Twitter? A S I’M FINALLY SITTING IN front of my computer to write this column, I’m frantically following real-time developments at one of the major conferences for web professionals working in higher education: HighEdWeb in Springﬁeld, Mo. Even though I couldn’t make the trip this year, I can keep up with the greatest insights shared at the opening keynote, learn of the smartest tips presented during multiple sessions, and even get the lowdown on the parties, the food, and the quality of the internet network at the conference site. I’m thousands of miles away, yet I feel very connected to the community of attendees and all the action going on at this conference. No, I don’t have telepathic powers. I just use Twitter—following the conference hashtag: #heweb08—as many attendees of HighEdWeb did in October to post 140-character multiple updates about anything and everything happening before, during, and after the conference presentations. Never had to pass on an interesting conference for budget reasons? Or wondering why you should read a column about a web service powering the dissemination of 140-character messages? Here’s a short, 140-character answer about Twitter: It can help individuals and institutions reach out to their network to share info, request help, organize, and update everyone in real time. A bit dry, I know. Here are a few more examples to illustrate the long answer. At e Pennsylvania State University, Twitter has really brought together a core of web-related professionals. Instruc- Twitter’s 2007 blog award obtained de facto a direct pass to broader success with technology aﬁcionados. tional designers, social media folks, web managers, and marketing staﬀ from all across the Penn State system—the College of Arts and Architecture; the Penn State, Great Valley campus; e Oﬃce for Research Protections; Penn State World Campus; the Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) department— are represented. “We started oﬀ following each other around the time of the TLT Symposium, then connecting further through the Penn State Web Conference,” says Anne Petersen, assistant director of electronic communication for undergraduate admissions at Penn State. She answered my call for success stories using the social networking and microblogging platform, placed on Twitter itself back in September. “It’s become a very tight little community of members who bounce ideas oﬀ each other, share fun things, use each other for any sort of questions,” says Petersen. At Penn State, all that connectivity through Twitter eventually led to a daylong professional development event last August. e new Learning Design Summer Camp was almost entirely designed by this community. At the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Student Aﬀairs Webmaster Todd Sanders has been an avid Twitterer for a year and half (902 followers and more than 4,100 updates at the time of this writing). So it was a natural move for him to secure and set up 16 diﬀerent Twitter accounts for all the oﬃces within UWG Student Aﬀairs about a year ago. Originally, it was supposed to be another way to distribute information to students. e experiment was rolled out over the summer by admissions, advising, and registrar’s oﬃces. Early users among the diﬀerent oﬃces disseminated across campus discovered it was also an easy-touse and eﬃcient communication channel for these administrative oﬃce teams. “When everyone is up and running by the end of this year, it should be a great way to collaborate across Student Aﬀairs and solve real problems faster, build stronger working relationships, understand current project workloads, etc.,” says Sanders. EXPLOSION OF TWITTERERS According to the Wikipedia entry about Twitter, the web service was initially started as an internal research and development project at Obvious, a San Francisco-based startup, in March 2006. Karine Joly is the web editor behind www .collegewebeditor.com, a blog about higher ed web marketing, public relations, and technologies. She is also a web editor for an East Coast liberal arts college and a consultant on web projects for other institutions. January 2009 | 39 universitybusiness.com http://www.collegewebeditor.com http://www.universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - January 2009

University Business - January 2009
Contents
Editor's Note
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Behind the News
Sense of Place
Viewpoint
Money Matters
Financial Aid
Community College
From Data to Information
5 Reasons to Switch to Virtual Servers
Finished in a Flash
Internet Technology
What's New
End Note

University Business - January 2009