Swift Kick Central

Twitter As A Free Campus, Group Text Messaging Provider (Updated)

In May 2009 I wrote a post on how to turn Twitter into a free SMS alert system for your campus. Back then, the major hang up was people had to have a Twitter account for it to work. With student adoption of Twitter hovering pretty low at colleges, this was a problem.

Last week Twitter recognized the issue and introduced an updated tool called Fast Follow.

"The mobile team here at Twitter has rolled out a new feature called Fast Follow, and its genius lies in its simplicity: text “follow [account]” to 40404 (Twitter’s U.S. shortcode) and you’ll immediately start getting that account’s tweets via SMS—without ever signing up for Twitter."

Eric Stoller, writer for Inside Higher Ed, reported on Fast Follow and how it could be integrated into the campus culture.

"You could place your school's admissions Twitter account name and the Twitter SMS number on your marketing collateral. A school could even have multiple Twitter accounts that could then be included on strategic mailings or promotional microsites. Campaign tracking would be a snap! Prospective students do not have to be on Twitter to use Fast Follow."

Enterprise SMS tools will have a hard time justifying large price tags when competing against...free. I suspect an advantage they will have is back end assessment data. Though, knowing Twitter's history of openness, might be provided by a third party tool soon.

Curious to know if anyone has tried mass, or even departmental adoption of Fast Follow at their campus?

A Win For Student Generated Content

Fred Wilson, of A VC, reported on a ruling out of NYC between YouTube and Viacom.

Judge Louis Stanton of the Southern District Court in NYC issued his opinion in the long standing legal battle between YouTube and Viacom.

This decision means that other user generated content services will not have to make the choice that YouTube had to make. Judge Stanton ruled that YouTube was operating within the framework of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which says that web services that have infringing material in them must respond to take down notices but do not have to proactively weed out their services of all infringing material.

This is a big win for Education as ePortfolios become more popular and are bound to be filled with mixing and remixing of copyrighted content that would make any school's legal team go bonkers. While I'm sure it's not the end, it's a first step.

An Online Student Union in 3 Steps [Slides]

Title: Unleash the Beast: How Web Pros Will Lead The Revolution While Riding a Unicorn on a Rainbow of UGC.
Location: HighEdWeb Vassar College
When: May 6-7 2010
Overview: In 3 steps, Kevin explains how high ed web departments can lead the way past the doom and gloom future of education to one filled with Rainbows and Unicorns via an online student union filled with user generated content. (Note: Rainbows and Unicorns not required for success)

View more presentations from Kevin Prentiss.

School Website Design is Part of the Student Engagement Problem

In the first version of Red Rover's navigation bar, we included a 'Live Help' button (pictured below) that generated 5-8 sessions with students per day.

As more students joined Red Rover, we realized the 'Help' section needed to include more options other than just 'Live Help'. So we created a new 'Help' section (pictured below) and moved 'Live Help' under it.

Though we expanded the 'Help' options and 'Live Help' was still there, we went from 5-8 'Live Help' session per day to ZERO 'Live Help' sessions per day. Once 'Live Help' was moved, not a single student used the feature. It's not that an equal amount of traffic was dispersed to the other sections, but rather the entire 'Help' section was used less. I could say that our software just got better and thus students needed less help, but that's probably not the case.

With 'Live Help' directly on the main page we generated 5-8 sessions per day, but if the student had to click once more to use the feature it generated ZERO sessions per day. That's the difference one click deep on a website can make in terms of engagement.

So how many clicks does it take to get to your department's information on your school's website? Start at the homepage and literally count the number of clicks.

Each additional click means fewer students will actually see your content.

I know website design and UX design are not two more hats you're excited to put on over your 30 other hats, but as students consume more information online, our website design is becoming increasingly more important.

Visions of School 2.0

From the blog 2 Cents Worth » Visions of School 2.0:

"My vision of school/classroom 2.0 is, more than anything else, about conversations.  Traditional schools involved teachers and textbooks delivering information to students, and students reflecting that information back.  To better serve their future, today’s classrooms should facilitate teaching and learning as a conversation — two-way conversations between teachers and learners, conversations between learners and other learners, conversations among teachers, and new conversations between the classroom and the home and between the school and its community. "

Christian Long, President and CEO of DesignShare and think:lab.

Conversations are certainly a beautiful and useful means to learn. Considering multiple intelligence theory and multiple learning modalities, I have one personal note: sub "conversations" with interactions.

It blows my mind that so many classes that are meant to set students up for the future are merely 'listen to lecture', 'read required materials', 'write papers', 'take tests'.

This is a pretty awesome context to set up kids to live in the 1800's.

Good day to you, sir!

The Aim of Education

Peter Scholtes' diagram shows what we are facing right now as humans interacting with technology.

So for those of us that are older, we may see this diagram within the context of our lives, our personal history. For those of us that our younger, this diagram is not about history but just about the fact that our typical week contains some new technological improvement that is a combination of cool, interesting, and useful.

For more and more youth, high technology is a norm - a common, practical tool that facilitates a life that is more fun and engaging. Technology is not for us to ignore or condemn, regardless of our more slippery grasp of understanding it and why they use it so much. It just is, and younger generations not only like it, they use it to make their lives better.

As Myron Tribus poses, if the challenge for educators (and this includes parents) is to prepare our children to live in the future, then we must determine what kind of education prepares children to live in a world we cannot describe.