Category: Friday Five

Friday Five: 5 on 5

Like the day tripper of musical fame, I’m taking the easy way out on this week’s Friday Five. How so? By offering up five recent, more-than-decent blog posts, each about five things. Which means that this week you’re actually getting 25 things for the price of five. That’s better than your average Friday Five, which is always a great deal for the money. So, enjoy, and you’re welcome. Happy reading, and happy weekend.

  1. 5 (+1) keys to social media platform adoption, or “why some [social media platforms] catch on easily and others don’t.” Wise words from fellow higher ed blogger Tim Nekritz.
  2. 5 tactics for civil disagreement, a thoughtful post from Amber Naslund on disagreeing in ways “that can help take the disagreement in a constructive direction instead of leaving a wake of destruction, misunderstanding, and hurt feelings.”
  3. 5 innovative websites that could reshape the news, via Mashable, which says: “It’s difficult to predict whether or not these newly noticed innovators will become as popular as their predecessors, but they are introducing new approaches to the consumption of information that few have tried or thought of before.”
  4. Five reasons I’m not quitting Facebook, by Peter Shankman. Any blog that quotes Casey Stengel is worth sharing, if you ask me.
  5. Conan O’Brien’s 5 favorite YouTube clips, via Mashable again.

Friday Five: social media-savvy schools

Sometime during the Winter Olympics, CollegeSurfing.com decided to host some winter games of its own and came up with the Web 2.0 College Olympics to identify the most social media-savvy campuses for prospective students. But instead of limiting their competition to single gold, silver and bronze medalists, the CollegeSurfing.com folks listed their top “50 social media innovators in higher education.” Here are the top five from that list, with links to their Twitter feeds. If you’re looking for examples of how to do social media in higher ed, these are the top of the top — the gold standard.

  1. Tufts University gets kudos for its twittering dining halls, vibrant Facebook group and my favorite, Spark, a site devoted to the campus’s social media tools.
  2. Johns Hopkins University is cited for its “prolific” Twitter feed and “gets props for letting the Twitterverse in on its tongue-in-cheek swine flu lexicon.” (After these Olympics, Johns Hopkins earned my further admiration by pulling off the cleverest and most elaborate university April Fool’s prank of 2010.)
  3. Ithaca College is lauded for a lighthearted approach to Twitter “and more than a dozen blogs are easily accessible from the school’s home page.”
  4. Butler University. “Kudos to Butler for letting its mascot, an adorable bulldog, run his own Twitter account.” ‘Nuff said.
  5. Case Western Reserve University’s Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing. The only school within a university to earn gold medal status, this school earned notice for live-Tweeting a disaster drill for flight nursing camp students and for their own YouTube channel.

Special thanks to Georgy Cohen (@radiofreegeorgy), who first pointed this out several weeks back.