Month: August 2012

On August 15, don’t forget ed

This Wednesday, Aug. 15, the College Board‘s campaign to draw attention to higher education, Don’t Forget Ed, kicks into high gear.

The timing is not coincidental. The start of the fall semester just around the corner, and so are the national conventions of the two major political parties. And the goal of the “Don’t Forget Ed” campaign is to get both presidential candidates to pay attention to education.

Getting politicians to pay attention to education may sound simple, but it’s actually a pretty ambitious goal, given everything else on the national agenda. So that’s why the Don’t Forget Ed campaign needs our help.

What can you do? For starters, watch the video (also embedded below). Then go to the website to learn more about how you can help. Then, add your voice to the cause. Finally, on Aug. 15, join in on the Don’t Forget Ed social media rally on Twitter and Facebook. Follow @DontForgetEd on Twitter and use the #dontforgeted hashtag to spread the word about this effort. Let’s show our presidential candidates — and the world — just how the #highered community can rally. If we did it to help some of our own win a cross-country tweetrace, then surely we can band together for the future of education in our nation, right?

Friday Five: Follow the #highered leader edition

This morning, our chancellor at Missouri S&T, Cheryl B. Schrader, joined Twitter (as @SandTChancellor). Which makes sense, especially when you consider that [humblebrag] one of Twitter’s co-founders is a former S&T student, Jack Dorsey (@jack) [/humblebrag].

Chancellor Schrader’s first tweet

So, in honor of this momentous occasion, today’s Friday Five offers some resources and links about #highered presidents, chancellors and other leaders who have taken to Twitter.

  1. A good place to start is Andy Shaindlin‘s list of college and university presidents and other leaders who use Twitter.
  2. Revisit Patrick Powers‘ blog post, College presidents who lead 140 characters at a time. The post is over a year old but still provides great insights to the value of Twitter, and showcases some of the early adopters.
  3. Wondering about the value of Twitter for university leaders? Check Amanda Walgrove‘s piece on Huffington Post College, What College Presidents Can Gain From Tweeting. By taking to Twitter, college leaders “can serve to further personalize their institutions through online engagement and foster connection with a vast digital audience interested in the workings of an educational institution,” Walgrove writes. “Twitter provides a viable platform on which to connect with students, colleagues, alumni, student-run publications and groups, college offices and even prospective attendees.”
  4. One journalist’s take on why more college presidents should be on Twitter. The writer for this piece, Lauren Landry, focuses on three presidents from schools in and around Boston — Tufts’ Anthony Monaco, Babson College’s Len Schlesinger and Northeastern’s Joseph Aoun — and wonders, “Where is everyone else?”
  5. If the real college presidents aren’t tweeting (and even if they are), there’s a good chance someone is cranking up a parody account. In Fake college presidents go cray cray on the Twitters, The Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson reports on the trend and serves up a cautionary tale for any leader planning to create a Twitter presence: Prepare to be parodied.

P.S. – For those who don’t know what a “humblebrag” is, here’s a bonus link.