web 2.0 – Page 174 – Andrew Careaga

Writer and social marketing consultant Jeneane Sessum‘s recent post about how much personality to inject into a corporate blog (and the Diva Marketing Blog post she links to) both offer some serious food for thought to we few who blog on behalf of our employers. While some of us do both, how much of our personal information should we share in a corporate (or, by extension, educational) blog? Sessum writes:

Questions — Can you write ‘personally’ without sharing details from your personal life? Can a professional blog be personal and professional too and still be ‘weighty’ enough to matter?

What are the risks of integraing or separating your “selve(s)” online. And what about other social spaces–profiles on myspace, orkut, friendster, facebook; professional connections on linkedin, ‘personalities’ on second life; photos on flickr; videos, podcasts and everything else Media 2.0? Are we becoming more dissociated or more integrated?

This hits close to home for me since launching UMR‘s name change conversations blog just under two weeks ago. I want the prose to be lively and conversational — or at least readable and certainly not “institutional.” But I try to maintain a professional distance in my writing on that blog.

I liken the approach to that of the newspaper editorial writers whose job it is to present the “platform” of their employer. If we really need an outlet for our own voices, there’s always the opportunity to create a personal blog (like this one, or this) to sate our egos and give voice to our souls. Here, I can tell you that I’m digging the new Rickie Lee Jones CD, and that although the new Bloc Party is inventive and a new direction, it pales in comparison to Silent Alarm. But I won’t bring these topics up on the institutional blog. It’s irrelevant, and not appropriate to the purpose or audience of the blog.

The virtual university was high on the agenda at Sun Microsystem’s three-day Worldwide Education and Research Conference, held earlier this week in San Francisco. (I would have said “the university in cyberspace” rather than “virtual university,” had I not recently read erelevant’s recent lamentations about the death of the cyberspace concept and agreed with many of his points). The ZDNet report on the conference notes that:

Virtual worlds are already beginning to change higher education, according to several educators.

For example, more than 70 universities have built island campuses in Second Life, according to Stuart Sim, CTO and chief architect of Moodlerooms, which builds structures in virtual worlds and offers course management software. Sim said his company is currently developing tools to help universities better manage students and courses delivered in Second Life. That way, universities can have an application to control adding or removing a student avatar to the island campus, he said. The project is dubbed Sloodle.com.

Gerri Sinclair, executive director of the master’s degree program for digital media at the Great Northern Way Campus in Vancouver, Canada, said her group is building a Second Life virtual campus alongside its physical one. “Our students are digital natives, and they don’t want to be reached in traditional ways. So we’re creating a virtual campus as we’re building our real campus,” Sinclair said.

Jane Kagon, director of UCLA’s Extension Department of Entertainment Studies and Performing Arts, also announced during the conference that the university has opened a Second Life island for its digital-film students.

“It’s an interesting time” to be part of gaming, noted Chris Melissinos, Sun’s chief gaming officer. “There’s an opportunity to grab this technology and new modes of communication and use them for a greater purpose.”

It’s starting to sound like universities are going to need to get a presence in Second Life. Which frightens some of us who are struggling to even get a first life.

Via Wired Campus (link).