Month: April 2007

Introducing Higher Ed Experts

In addition to running her highly successful niche blog, College Web Editor, and staying busy as a real college web editor, Karine Joly has managed to find the time to launch another online venture, Higher Ed Experts. The new site combines the attributes of a social network with online professional development, and it looks promising.

Higher Ed Experts

Higher Ed Experts is designed to “provide professional development and social networking online opportunities to higher ed professionals working in Web, marketing, PR and admissions.” Karine lists a few of the benefits in her post about the new site. Best of all, registration is free, so why not sign up now and surf around the site a bit?

Disclosure: I’m a member of the advisory panel for Karine’s new venture.

Assessing Virginia Tech’s response and text messaging as a crisis communications tool

Karine Joly points to an Inside Higher Ed article evaluating Virginia Tech’s response to the massacre as it unfolded on Monday, April 16. The article covers some by-now-familiar ground and points to the emerging trend in getting the word out to the masses: text messaging.

[T]he one medium that the university could not take advantage of was also the one that most experts cited as being the most useful: text messages. While not a major component of most universities’ crisis strategies at the moment, the messages are beginning to take hold.

A lot of universities (ours included) have been talking about including text messaging as a means to get the word out to students and others during times of crisis. But so far it’s been mostly talk. One exception, according to the IHE article, is Montclair State University in New Jersey. There, students are required to have a cell phone and service that are compatible with the campus’ network. “We’ve made some deliberate decisions about it, and that is that we’ll only use it for emergency reasons,” said Karen Pennington, the vice president of student development and campus life.