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...

It’s no secret to any of us that the economic recession that both our country and world are feeling right now will (already is) having a direct impact on higher education.  All signs point to the challenges that colleges and universities will encounter this year and next, at the very least.  As I heard our President remark on these types of national issues this morning, it hit me (maybe for the first time) how the efforts of myself and my colleagues in the Admissions office influence the viability of our institution. Wow. That’s pretty heavy-duty stuff on a Monday morning. So...

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. ...

Wow, this one’s really interesting.  It seems that 1st Financial Bank USA has launched a site called CollegeData, a place where students can search for colleges, sort through the financial aid process, and perhaps most interestingly, calculate their odds of getting in with the Admissions Tracker.  Credit card and student loan offers also abound on the site. The Admissions tracker is interesting because students can indicate whether they’ve applied to a specific school and also if they’ve been accepted, waitlisted, or denied.  Other students can then assess their chances of getting...

I’ve posted a fair amount about the video content that we’ve been creating for prospective students from the Admissions office at Hope.  Along with creation, I’ve been trying to promote and syndicate like crazy.  In the process I inadvertently learned how to develop and submit a video podcast to iTunes.  Here’s my stress-free process for doing so: 1.  You’ll need to put together some content. Depending on your setup, this can be fairly easy to do.  I’ve outlined our process for putting together our monthly updates in a previous post.  What we end up with is a...

So our first video update was a big success, with about 480 views on Vimeo (and who knows how many on Facebook/YouTube).  This month we’re touching on life around Hope during the holiday season.  The biggest difference this month is that we are bringing in the students’ personal perspectives, which should make the video even more popular than the last. This month’s update also comes on the heels of both Facebook and YouTube integrating HD playback into their video embeds.  Facebook has also recently built video plays into their “insights” reporting mechanism.  Never...