I had a great time both attending and presenting at the annual MACAC conference on April 30, held this year in Grand Rapids at the L.V. Eberhard Center on the campus of Grand Valley State University.  A good number of my colleagues attended as well, including Garrett Knoth, who gave a presentation on counselor recommendation letters and college essays.  I was also able to sit in on Nathaniel Hancock’s (see Zinch) presentation on social media (which happened to include an excellent nod to “The Office” with a reference to the “Dunder Mifflin Infinity” episode in season...

In my last post I talked about a recent survey that suggested that we focus our attention on our colleges’ websites, student search websites, and the like.  I argued that while those venues have their important place, sites like Facebook, student blogs, and YouTube also have a significant place when it comes to creating a recruitment culture in the age of web 2.0.  As promised, I’d like to discuss prioritization of social media within the context of your overall recruitment strategy. So here’s my main point, right up front: Every point of contact that a prospective student...

This article recently made its rounds through our inboxes at Hope, and I couldn’t help but feel like it underminded some of the work that I had been doing with Facebook, Vimeo, and the like.  For quick reference, here are the results of the survey that Cappex did among 1000 high school seniors: Cappex survey results It makes a whole lot of sense that “a college’s website” is the number one item on the list.  However I would contend that this article suggests that you should shift your focus away from student blogging, Facebook, MySpace, et al.  (To be honest, I’m not...

Note:  This post may seem to digress from the normal topics heralded in this blog, but I promise there’s a connection to technology and higher ed.  Read on to find out more! We were having dinner with friends last summer, and they were telling us about the amazing new cable service they had installed.  It’s called U-verse, they said, and instead of traditional cable service, AT&T actually delivers the TV over the internet. Loving technology, the idea of TV over the internet seemed pretty amazing to me.  I actually got up from the table (right in the middle of dinner), got my...

I take no credit for our latest venture.  After stumbling upon Rachel Reuben’s recent post on .eduGuru just after our Christmas break, we quickly decided it was something we needed to move on for our fall 2009 students.  It was actually something that I had been mulling over since the Innovative Educators’ conference in Cincinnati this past June, but I wasn’t sure we had the resources to make it happen.  Once I had read Rachel’s post, I knew it was something that we could get going quickly. So last Wednesday I began the process of putting a similar site together from Hope. ...