Category: higher education

Friday Five: not that you asked, but…

The Internet is full of unsolicited advice. Some of it is even useful. Here are five bits of counsel that may interest you:

  1. For writers: Five easy steps to editing your own work, by Anna Goldsmith of The Hired Pens, guest blogging at CopyBlogger.
  2. For marketers struggling with ROI of social media: Valeria Maltoni of Conversation Agent offers some ideas about measurement as part of a marketing meme making the rounds.
  3. For communicators, marketers, history buffs and closet socialists: FutureLab offers a lesson in mass communications with Soviet Propaganda – The Art of Mass Persuasion. Posted by Ilya Vedrashko on Thursday, the 90th anniversary of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, it features Vedrashko’s slide show of images that “showcase some of the tools and techniques used by the Soviet AgitProp (agitation and propaganda) as well as other governments, democratic and otherwise, and how some of the imagery was borrowed by brand marketers.” Makes you wonder who really won the cold war.
  4. For web designers and managers: Sam Jackson’s take on why college and university web sites don’t make the grade.
  5. For alumni relations folks: Andy Shaindlin (alumni futures) introduces a new Facebook group just for you.

Bonus link: discovered later but for everyone — be they writers, editors, designers, marketers, bosses, bureaucrats, teachers, students … anyone and everyone: 10 Simple, Sure-fire Ways to Make Today Your Best Day Ever. Just gloss over the metaphysical portions if you like (although I recommend reading the whole thing). If you don’t read it today, read it before you go to work on Monday.

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Now playing: The New Pornographers – Adventures In Solitude
via FoxyTunes

‘I buy hundred dollar textbooks that I never open,’ and other video commentary about the state of higher ed

Mike Wesch, a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University and one of the most thought-provoking faculty members to have discovered YouTube, has once again hit a nerve with a video message gone viral. Last winter it was The Machine Is Us/ing Us, a presentation of how the Internet and hypermedia is changing the way we communicate, collaborate and work (discovered via a February 2007 entry on Karine Joly’s blog). This time around, Wesch addresses the state of higher education in the United States — or at Kansas State, anyway — with A Vision of Students Today. Clocking in at under five minutes, the video, in Wesch’s words, “summariz[es] some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.”

Reaction on the web has been widespread — more than 4,300 comments on the YouTube site alone. At Wired Science, Aaron Rowe calls Wesch’s assessment (actually a collaboration with 200 K State students) “spot on” and adds:

For young men and women that are accustomed to the instant gratification of the web, even the simple act of flipping through the the glossary of a textbook may be unthinkable. Venerable professors may view this as impatience and laziness, but that would be a superficial assessment. My generation has become acclimated to the efficiency and immediate feedback of the internet. Once you have shown a farmer a tractor, they will never want to plow a field by hand again.

Watch the video, and ponder what it means for our business. You can also join the discussion.

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Now playing: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss – Fortune Teller
via FoxyTunes