We're investigating the use of student blogs for admissions/recruiting. We're also looking the overall risk vs. benefit of allowing more open systems, maybe off of the main university site. Administration folk here have expressed trepidation about this idea of student-generated content.
1. Have you built an admissions blog or similar open publishing system that allowed student posts on public fora? If so, what is the URL(s)?
2. If you did create an admissions/recruiting blog with student-generated content, did you compensate your students in any way to write posts?
3. Have you allowed comments on posts? If yes, did only you allow other students to comment? or also allow public comments?
These are many large questions that must be answered for each university determined by its culture and administration, but here is my take. Our university has had student blogs since 2004 and I've been managing them since 2007.
Hey there! We went through the same things at our college, here's what we did:
1. We don't have an admissions blog, we do have an open blog for our student interns though. They are allowed to post anything and everything, at least 1 post a week is required for part of their internship credit. We are a music college, being able to intern at some of the high profile companies we work with is a big "selling point." http://www.blog.mcnallysmith.edu/internships
2. We don't compensate the students, it's part of their internship program.
3. We do allow comments, and have only had one problem up to date, which turned out to actually help everyone in the end. A member from the public found out one of out interns was working at the management company of one of her favorite artists, and she was unhappy with the communication of releases and other events. Our intern was the only person she could get to, so her and her fan club started attacking his blog postings, in the end the management company used this information to both put up contact information AND change their communication.
4. For this project we used Moveable Type. I liked the ability to have one admin on all the different blogs we have, and adding users to blogs is slick. I don't love their template editing process, it took me some time to learn the ins & outs of it.
1. We have http://fontbonneblogs.wordpress.com/ currently, but I am planning to install multi-user WP on our domain and host this on our own servers very soon (probably blog.fontbonne.edu). We are also going to be implementing WordPress as a tool for our admissions department to communicate with high school & community college counselors (so we'll have something like counselors.fontbonne.edu), hopefully soon.
2. Students write our blogs (they are wide ranging in topic, but we do consider it an admissions tool) and we pay them $5 a post.
3. Yes, comments are allowed. Name and email are required. We don't get many comments at all, but I think that's because they're relatively new and we need to do a better job of promoting them (which is on my agenda).
4. WordPress. We currently use that as our tool for site news as well (but integrated enough that you wouldn't know it was separate from our CMS).
We also have a work study student who is paid to be the day to day admin of social media, including the blogs. I give overall strategy guidance but she is logging in and checking things more regularly. Between the two of us, I'm confident we'd find anything offensive and delete it quickly, but we haven't had any problems yet.
Greetings,What are you all doing online with "old" magazine stories? Do you delete issues after so many years? 5 years? 10? I'm torn between keeping all on for historical purposes or keeping just a few years online to simplify the site (ala Gerry McGovern.) Curious as to what you see best practices being.ThanksSara KisseberthBluffton Universitywww.bluffton.eduSee More
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The 2020 Annual Conference of the Higher Education Web Professionals Association (HighEdWeb) will travel to Little Rock, Arkansas, this October 18-21 — and the call for proposals is now open! As a digital professional in higher education, we know you have great ideas and experiences to share. From developers, marketers and programmers to managers, designers, writers and all team members in-between, HighEdWeb provides valuable professional development for all who want to explore the unique…See More